


in the deep forest green

by philthestone



Series: then she'll be a true love of mine [9]
Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: Accidental Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, This is a love story, all i do is project my parents onto fictional character and write stories about the power of love, as usual we abandon wider historical accuracy to write a story that is shaped like a friend, jamie fraser decided to have a big loving heart and here i am 21k later, whom is surprised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:54:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27343888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: “I’m Frank!” Frank yells, pressing himself as close to the wall behind him as humanly possible with one arm immobilized and the rest of him tangled in starchy bedding. “Frank Randall!Please!”Everyone freezes.From the other side of the door, there is the faint sound of birds chirping, as though everything going on in this cursed cabin is suspended in a reality far away from the real world of the outdoors. The assorted tangle of children is wide-eyed, mouthing silently at each other in total confusion.Finally, the old man lowers his dirk half a centimeter, and says -- very slowly, as though barely able to believe it himself --“... Claire’s… Frank?”Claire Fraser tells some stories, fields an odd, recurring dream, and finally learns the true magic of the Stones.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp & Brianna Fraser, Claire Beauchamp & Fergus Fraser, Claire Beauchamp & Frank Randall, Claire Beauchamp & Murtagh Fraser, Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser, Frank Randall & Roger Wakefield MacKenzie, Jamie Fraser & Fergus Fraser, Murtagh Fraser & A Large Brood of Chaotic Grandchildren
Series: then she'll be a true love of mine [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1762789
Comments: 54
Kudos: 131





	in the deep forest green

**Author's Note:**

> hello, dearest friends
> 
> here we are. the cumulative story in this arc.
> 
> to note: i did not write this story as anything other than exactly what i thought needed to be. any similarities in secondary character names, or the geographical location, are borrowed from canon but made to fit into this version of the universe, and are not meant to be direct parallels. 
> 
> i've been working on this story for months, now, and its finally here. i hope, sincerely, that you will hold it close to your heart as much as i do
> 
> as always, the title is from scarborough fair, and reviews light up my life

\- I. -

For whatever reason, the first time Frank wakes up, all he can think of is that bloody Robert Frost poem. 

_Two roads diverged in the wood, and I … I took the road less travelled by._

What an inconvenient idea, he’d always thought. When faced with such a convergence, Frank had insisted to his mother once -- because she _had_ always liked those awful American poets, hadn’t she -- the ability to discern the better road was not so simple as purely applying the label of _less travelled_. All well and good to declare it, but how would one come to _know_ the difference? 

_… Had_ they taken the one less travelled? 

Certainly, Frank can not remember any of it for the life of him. Roger had been so insistent they explore than damned cove, and then suddenly they’d misplaced the road entirely, and once they _found_ it again --

Actually, the first time Frank wakes up, he really cannot think much farther than simply registering an awful, full-body ache. 

“-- he dyin’? Oh, Christ. Oh, Lord, this is all my fault. Oh, God. I didna mean for any of this to happen. Can ye save him? Is it fatal? I’ll give ye money -- I -- I -- I mean, I haven’t got any now, but I’’ll -- oh, sweet Jesus. I said I wasna an outdoorsman, I’m only doin’ my doctorate in history --” 

Roger is usually a very level-headed young man, but just now, he sounds quite in the middle of a good old-fashioned panic. 

“Fer cryin’ out loud, ye numpty,” says a second, rather more girlish voice. “Ye look as if ye’ll be sick! Have ye ne’er seen a broken arm before?”

“ _Hush_ , Marsali.” A third voice; another woman. “But you best get ahold of yourself, young man. Will the arm set, Joe?”

“I reckon it’ll be fine, honey.”

“See! _Numpty_.” 

“Nasty break, though -- prob’ly gotta let Claire look it over when she gets back. Hold him steady now --”

The ache sharpens, and swallows him. 

Frank dreams of an empty moor, dried-out and vast and lonely, and the new Cadillac they’d rented in Chapel Hill. 

The second time Frank wakes up, he manages to actually open his eyes. There’s an odd smell of alcohol lingering in the air, overlaid with other smells: something herby that he can’t quite identify, the bright smell of cedar, freshly cut, and the faint, background tang of manure, the sort that always lingers around farmland. He is on his back. All he can see above him is a shadowy, wooden-beamed ceiling. Through a window to the side, pale sunlight filters into the room, making it more light than dark, but muted enough not to worsen a headache, which he realizes with rushing clarity he is most certainly suffering from. Worst still, he is made suddenly aware of the fact that one eye will not open correctly, and that his entire face -- like a jab of a hot fireplace poker in the side -- is _throbbing_. He looks down. His left arm is bandaged, and strapped firmly against his chest. His legs are covered in a sort of sheet, and are leaden and sore. 

Everything else feels like it’s moving through treacle. 

But not the good kind. That awful, gummy sort that one would find in the corner market in Oxfordshire.

Christ, but he hasn’t thought of Oxfordshire in a while. _The Robert Frost poem_ , he thinks again, without any true understanding of why.

Metal clinks against glass. Vaguely, he registers a shadowy figure moving around to his side, and, as though through a far-off gramophone, voices filter into his consciousness.

“-- Flannigan’s lost her brooch again. Ian says he thinks Adso ate it, but _I_ dinna think so ‘cause Adso’s so wee an’ Mrs. Flannigan’s brooch’s near the size of Joanie’s head. Only, no one can find it, either, so Fergus suggested we should tell her the faeries stole it, but then I thought, maybe Adso _did_ eat it, an’ then that would be awful wicked of us.”

“Adso’ll barely eat a river fly, the picky little rascal. Ladies’ brooches ain’t in his dinner plans.”

“That’s what _I_ said! But now she’s gone an’ begged Da into helpin’ her find it --”

“Oh, Lord.”

“-- an’ ye ken how Da is, she’ll ask so nicely an’ he’ll feel badly an’ say _Mrs. Flannigan, on my honour_ , an’ then he doesn’t know how t’ask her if it mightn’t be sittin’ right there on her dressin’ room table. Mama’s been laughin’ about it since Sunday noon.”

“Poor Mrs. F. That eyesight of hers ain’t gettin’ better anytime soon, I’ll say.”

Frank’s own sight blurs, then slowly focuses, just enough that he can make out movement and colour. 

Across from him, by the dreamlike shape of a bench close to his feet, loiters what appears to be a young boy. He’s swaying, like a dancer. It’s a movement easy and earnest and graceful, almost as though he is an apparition that Frank has dreamt up, and in his left hand is an apple, of the lumpy, crabbish variety, which he is steadily demolishing in measured, cheerful bites. 

He’s not quite tall for a boy, but certainly not short either -- lithely built but slender, with lanky arms and legs and high, sharp cheekbones that have rounded at the tops with an irreverent, playful grin. Tied messily at the back of his head is a bundle of tangled, wispy curls -- _surely_ far too long -- that Frank’s muddled senses identify as _red_ a moment delayed. It is a coppery, bright, earthy colour, the sort he’s found only people with truly ginger hair possess.

The boy turns, humming. The sound feels like it’s coming from a far-away, distant place. He does not seem to notice Frank’s open eyes, silhouetted as he is in a blurry, fugue-like shadow of colours and shades that Frank can’t make sense of. 

“-- so odd, Joe, he jumps at all the fair strangest things. He’s nice enough, I suppose, but he doesn’t know the _first_ thing about farm chores. Willie an’ Ian kept tryin’ t’show him how this mornin’ and he looked fair like a lost kitten, an’ I had t’stop Ian from takin’ the pish out’ve him. Which was terribly good of me, by the way --”

“Well now, I reckon he’s just had a bit of a shock, kiddo. Ain’t no easy thing being attacked on the side of the road like that, get all your valuables stolen. You’d do well to remember that.”

“I suppose so. Marsali says she thinks they’re from France. _Willie_ thinks they’re from th’moon --”

“Lord, that child --”

“Which isnae _so_ unreasonable as all that, only moon travel doesn’t exist.”

“And I’m sure you’n Willie are terrible sore about that, huh.”

“Aye, ‘cause Willie’s got all these ideas on how the moon’s made’ve frogs!”

“Now whose fault is that?”

“ _Fergus’s_! Anyhow, I came t’tell Marsali she ought to come down to the creek with me later. I’m goin’ t’test a new rigging, for the wash line.”

“Hmmm. Well, she went out to use the privy, or somethin’. Didn’t fully tell me. Your daddy and Fergus back yet?”

“No. Mama isn’t either. Somehow _everyone’s_ havin’ their bairns at once. D’ye ever find that happens, Joe? Like all’ve one thing in the world decides to _be_ at the same time, and you don’t _really_ know how it happens like that? Mama says if I look hard enough I can prob’ly find somethin’ in mathematics that’ll explain it, but so far it hasn’t turned up in any of Da’s books.”

The voices are fading to something even more distant and echoey, and Frank’s headache is not getting any better. _Roger_ , he thinks, because he truly could not bear it if something happened to that boy. Then he sinks further into whatever flat surface is holding him up.

“Bree honey, could you pass me that cloth just there?”

The words are cottony in his ears, just out of reach. The ginger-haired apparition turns again, one curling strand of hair slipping from the knot and drifting along its cheek, and two things happen at once: through some liminal veil in his subconscious, Frank registers that the figure in front of him is not boy, but girl -- and in a heartbeat of a moment, she seems to catch him in his wakefulness. His eyes lock onto hers: bright, intelligent blues, glimmering with slanted mischief and an unsettling sense of _knowing_. 

Absurdly, he thinks -- just before slipping out of consciousness again -- that there is something familiar about her. Like a long-forgotten memory, or a dream.

Then everything fades to black.

The third time Frank wakes up, he is, objectively, far more lucid.

His aches have receded to something dull and background, though unfortunately more identifiable now that he’s conscious. His arm still hurts -- probably broken, considering the bandage and sling -- and his jaw feels like it did when he was eighteen and got into his first ever fist fight, which was not an experience he had ever particularly wanted to relive. Unfortunately, he and Roger’s rather pathetic exploratory beachside excursion had had other plans, and Frank is left poking at an astoundingly raw split lip with his tongue whilst laid up in a bed in --

Wait. Where _is_ he?

Shifting, he props himself up on his uninjured elbow and finally takes a moment to observe his surroundings. 

He is still in the wooden-ceilinged room, with its airy window and soft-filtering light. The smells of his muddled memory creep in again -- alcohol, farmland, and that earthy, sweetened touch of foliage -- but now the sweetness of the herbs is sharper, and there is another smell, hanging just beneath the surface, metallic like weaponry and old-fashioned gunpowder. The window has been opened; soft, gauzy curtains made of a material he’s sure his housekeeper would know are floating aimlessly in a gentle breeze, beyond which there is the summer-like yellow green of sunlight, and distant voices that he can’t make out. 

The interior of the place is unlike anything he’s ever seen before. He’s laid up on what appears to be a simple wooden cot, pushed to the corner of a rectangular space that is not _cluttered_ , but certainly not sparse, either. A fireplace with the faded embers of a dying fire gives the latter end of the room a warm, somewhat forgotten glow, in a way that makes Frank wonder if it isn’t routinely used to bring some rustic pot or other to bubble. Along the wall immediately across from him are strung an upside-down variety of flora with simple brown thread, all at varying stages of dehydration. Just below them is an assortment of tinted jars, arranged in neat little rows along what seems to be a handmade shelf that has been nailed into the wall with a surprising degree of precision. The few bottles that are labelled cannot be made out from where Frank is laying, but one or two of the rows have paper-and-ink notes stuck carefully to the ledge beneath them -- one in block-like and somewhat childish lettering, but one, too, in the bold, loopy, masculine penmanship of someone clearly comfortable with the written word. 

The shelf leads to a far less organized workbench that hugs the right angle of the wall and runs parallel to Frank’s cot. At its far corner sits a messy heap of bandages all looking the faded white colour of clean surgeon’s cloth. A single vase of dried wildflowers comes next, and then the somewhat unnerving remains of a well-preserved skull (human? thinks Frank -- _surely_ not), a teetering stack of small, bound books, and a neatly-arranged little pile of glittering, multi-coloured rocks. An array of sharp implements lay scattered over the bench’s surface, and they glint, just slightly, in the pale light filtering in from outside. Just to their left is, despite its odd unfamiliar design, the unmistakable shape of a microscope, and underneath _that_ , to the end of the bench, there is a rifle leaning against the wall; one long-bladed knife, a fine-toothed saw and an axe hung from raised hooks; and the folded-up figure of a second cot.

If Frank were even slightly a more superstitious man, he’d be sorely tempted to say he’d landed himself in a witch’s cottage. 

But rational mind notwithstanding, something else is making him hesitate; no Grimm’s fairy tale hag could be the overseer of this place. 

Every detail of the cottage feels infused with a warm, deliberate sort of care. There is tenderness in the arrangement of the rocks, loving-care in the placement of the microscope, the strung herbs, the books. Even the knives look well-used in the sort of way beloved things are, mismatched as their handles may be. Frank stares at the lopsided labels on the shelf and feels an absurd, unfamiliar sense of longing.

Most interesting, though, are the sketches pinned to the wall above the bench. 

They’re different sizes, and not arranged particularly artfully but rather instead like someone pinned the first one up, and added another upon the completion of each new portrait. Most of them are of plants -- smudgy renderings of flowers, springy shapes of herbs, and shadowy outlines of mushrooms -- and are named in a loose hand that is a slightly more scrawled, messy imitation of the man’s loopy script labelling the tonics. There is one portrait in particular that catches Frank’s eye, and has him staring unabashedly across the room. It’s done in charcoal, as are the rest of the drawings, and captures the smiling face of a little boy in the exact moment he is looking over his shoulder at the artist. It’s by no means a professional-grade portrait -- in fact, it looks decidedly amateur in technique and style -- but it has caught the movement of his riotous curls, and the obvious dynamism of his delighted laughter.

Frank sits motionless on the cot and feels every hair at the back of his neck stand on end; he _knows_ the child in the portrait.

He does not know how, or why. Muddled as his memory of how he landed here may be, he is certain that he has never met this child before in his life. But surely -- _surely_ \-- there is _something_ \--

His eyes land on the signature at the bottom of the hanging ream of paper, and he feels as though a bucket of ice has been dumped down his spine.

 _Drawing of Willie_ , reads the inscription, in the same messy scrawl. _By me (Bree)_ , _January 14th, 1759._

 _Seventeen fifty-nine_. 

Frank feels his sore mouth go dry.

The oddly-shaped microscope. The rifle against the wall -- not rifle but _musket_ , at once too elaborate and too simple in its cocking mechanism. His historian’s mind catches up with his lagging body at full speed, slamming into his senses like an off-the-rails freight train. _The books, the fireplace, the fabric of the drapes_.

Unbidden, he remembers the shadowy, pixie-like figure of the ginger-haired girl, dressed in breeches and a billowy-sleeved sark that any fool worth their salt who had studied the mid-eighteenth century for as long as he had should have been able to recognize. 

_Dear God_ , thinks Frank. But _how_? Perhaps this is all an odd, strangely-shaped dream. He could be still asleep -- a head injury would cause something like this, would it not? Or perhaps he and Roger hit the bottle last night, and had one too many, and he has no injury at all. Perhaps --

“Well now, he’s finally awake!”

Frank starts so badly he nearly slams his broken arm into the cedar-planked wall behind him.

“I -- I beg your pardon?” he stammers, in decidedly inelegant fashion, before turning to see a grinning, middle-aged man leaning over the workbench, offering him a genial look. He’s of fairly average height and build, with coarse, coily dark hair cropped close to his brown scalp and thick-set eyebrows resting over warm brown eyes. He’s dressed in similar clothes to the girl Frank remembers, in a simple linen shirt, vest, and dark breeches that taper off at his waist. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up at the elbows, and he’s rifling through the workbench with ease, picking up a fresh stretch of bandage from the bench and a bottle from the shelf before setting the cloth to soak in swift, assured movements.

The smell of alcohol, close-by and clear this time, fills the air. 

“I said, you finally woke up. Not that we ever thought you wouldn’t, mind, but you did take quite a beatin’ there. Gave that young friend of yours a real scare. _I_ sure wouldn’t want to be you right now, anyway.”

Bits and pieces of memory flood back to him, still sluggish as though wading out of that treacle. 

“Roger!” 

“That’s the one.”

“Well is he -- is he alright?”

“Oh, he’s _fine_. Kinda jumpy, sure, but the kids decided they’d have him helpin’ out on the main farm ‘til you woke up, so he wouldn’t fret so much.” Pausing in the act of measuring out a dose of some strong-smelling tincture, the man casts a sideways look at Frank, then says, “Seems like you have now, I reckon.”

Frank makes the concerted effort to blink, and then shakes his head, once. _Cool head, old boy. You have military training, for Christ’s sake_.

He puts aside _the kids_ and any mention of _the farm_ and follows the man’s movements with his good eye.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as carefully as possible. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“What? Oh, not long at all!” Taking a few strides across the room, the man kneels a moment to stoke the fire, then stands again, coming over and setting the soaked cloth and bottle down beside Frank’s cot with a cheerful resolve. “Barely two days. Good thing Young Ian ’n Isaiah found you two when they did, though. Nobody wants to lie in a ditch in the road for more’n a couple hours, that’s for sure.” 

_A ditch by the side of the road_. _Bloody hell_. 

He clears his throat carefully. 

“No, I don’t suppose they would. Where exactly are we?”

“Why, the Ridge, of course.” He gives Frank an odd look, then says, “You’n your companion got attacked by highwaymen on the Wilmington road. You took much more of the thrashin’ though, I gotta say. The kid got by with just a couple bruises.”

The image of the roadside, and the panic around not finding that damned rented Cadillac, and the men emerging from the woods piece slowly together in Frank’s mind.

“But we hadn’t any decent valuables,” he remembers, frowning, and then frowning further when the cut on his mouth throbs. “I gave them my wallet -- they can’t have --”

“Some men like violence just for its own sake,” says his companion grimly. “We been keepin’ these fellas at bay for near a year, now.”

“We?” In spite of himself, a note of panic creeps into his voice. 

“Now don’t you worry,” says the man firmly, misreading Frank’s tensed posture and no-doubt thoroughly overwhelmed expression as fear of the erstwhile attackers. “Fraser’s Ridge is the safest place in twenty miles. No one comes in or out ‘less they mean to do the people livin’ here well. You can take it from me,” he adds, “‘cause if it weren’t, my wife and I would’ve found our way North years ago. Now, you gonna let me take a look at that arm, or what?”

Standing over Frank, he is unassuming enough, but even thoroughly discombobulated and half-convinced he’s dreaming Frank can detect the edge of challenge in the man’s warm eyes. It is not quite within tradition of the proverbial shake down, but one that Frank registers nonetheless, in belated, staggered pieces. He glances again at the musket resting on the wall -- _don’t think about it, Frank_ \-- then back at the stranger’s face in front of him. Something about the man’s tone makes Frank trust immediately that he _is_ safe from violence, if at mercy of the goodwill of others. 

But underneath the casual grace and easy humour, perhaps that same trust does not extend towards Frank. 

“Of course,” he says, somewhat stupidly. 

The man’s eyes narrow momentarily, before he slowly leans back, and gives Frank an amused look. 

Then he says,

“The name’s Joseph Abernathy.” He picks up the wet cloth, offering Frank a less guarded, wider-mouthed grin. “I’m the one who set your arm. How’s your face feelin’?”

“It’s … been better.”

“Yeah, I’ll figure. Well I’ll clean up that lip of yours, take a look at your head, but not much more to be done that ain’t your body healin’ itself. Good thing is it was a clean sorta break, so it shouldn’t give you much trouble. But we’ll have Queen Liz take a look at it when she gets back from helpin’ Fanny with her baby, just to make sure.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Joseph Abernathy shoots him a laughing look, the sort that belies a long-held inside joke. 

“Good friend of mine, lady of this here surgery. I’m good with healin’ sick people,” he explains, taking Frank’s face in one large-palmed hand and dabbing methodically with the alcohol-soaked cloth at all the spots that sting the most, “better than good, I’d say -- it’s what I’m known for, ‘less you ask my wife, ‘cause she’ll tell you what I’m known for is not listenin’ to her -- but I’m no surgeon. That’s her thing.”

“I see,” Frank manages, attempting to subdue the urge to flinch at each pass of the makeshift antiseptic. He thinks about the distinct energy of the strange room he’s in and tries to imagine the woman it belongs to. Once again he is caught in between irrational imaginings of some woodland fae and the warty crones of his childhood bedtime stories. Neither of these seem to match the friendly warmth in Abernathy’s voice when referring to her. 

Absurdly, he thinks of a painting he saw once of Elizabeth the First, staring imperiously at the viewer and bedecked in those ridiculous frills.

“How ‘bout you, you got a name?”

“Hm?”

“A name,” Abernathy says again, raising one thick-set eyebrow.

“Oh -- I’m Frank,” says Frank, without thinking. “Frank Randall.”

The other man drops his cloth into a little basket at the foot of the cot and turns back to him, a faint look of interest in his eyes.

“Randall, huh? You any relation of Mary’s?”

 _All these unfamiliar names_ , Frank thinks, feeling for the first time since waking a genuine lick of annoyance. _Just thrown around as though I’m meant to bloody understand them._

His eyes flick over to the sketch again, with the terrifying, surreal date scrawled at the bottom.

“No, I don’t know any Marys. I’m terribly sorry, Mister Abernathy --”

“Call me Joe,” says Joe, sounding -- once more -- far too amused for Frank’s liking.

“Yes, erm -- could you by any chance tell me what year it is?” At the other man’s strange look, he adds, with a practiced laugh, “Sorry, I’m a forgetful sort of chap. And, ah, with everything that’s happened, you know ...”

He trails off, expectant. 

Joe’s eyes are narrowed, but after a moment and an aborted scratch of his head, he seems to decide that Frank’s question is not wholly unreasonable.

“Why, it’s seventeen sixty-one, of course.”

 _This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a feverish, hallucinogenic dream triggered by one too many drinks and a manic dedication to your bloody job, Frank. Oh, where is that Roger when you fucking need him_.

“I see,” Frank says, in a voice that feels resoundingly detached from his body.

“Where you folks from, anyhow?”

Frank swallows. His throat feels like sandpaper. 

“Boston,” he croaks. 

At least that won’t give away much.

“Boston, huh?” Joe is now carefully tilting Frank’s head side-to-side in a thorough inspection of the purpling bruise he is sure is decorating his left eye. “Well, your eyes seem to be focusin’ just fine. We heard there’s some interestin’ talk goin’ on with folks in Boston.”

Unbidden, Frank is suddenly reminded of the conversation he’d had with Roger on the phone, the quiet, unassuming week right before they’d decided to take this inadvisable trip down to North Carolina. 

_I ken ye’re more interested in things that happened than those that are happenin’, Uncle Frank, but these students in Chapel Hill, they’re makin’ history. I canna say I’m a historian an’ no’ care for any of it. Besides, the Carolinas’re known fer the waves of immigrants after the Risin’, no?_

He had been neck deep in a stack of half-graded graduate papers and only a quarter of his way into a glass of wine, and the idea of somewhere close to a beach had not sounded quite as uninteresting as it usually did. Weakened resolve, perhaps -- or maybe that was why Roger called him in the first place, stubbornly insistent that they remain in touch after he, too, moved to the US for schooling. At the very least old Reg raised a decent sort of boy, Frank thinks, but _now_ look where they are.

 _History in the making_. 

Roger had been speaking of the civil rights movement, oddly convinced that he could not in good conscience study history in the Americas without participating in current events. _It’ll be good fer ye to get away from your office_ , the boy had said, his usual good-natured, belligerent self over the phone. And perhaps it would have been, until they jointly made the foolish decision to take the road from Chapel Hill to Wilmington, and then follow the Old Country signs until they reached the caves along the beach.

Interesting talk in Boston, _indeed_.

Frank feels vaguely ill.

“I suppose it’s not quite as interesting as us hailing from France,” he says, more carefully than anything he has said thus far, watching as Joe steps away to wash his hands at a basin hidden under the workbench. Pushing his shoulders back, he waits for the reaction; if these people have anything to hide, then this might be a discerning moment.

Joe only laughs, tossing him a look over his shoulder. “I thought you might’ve been awake earlier than you let on.”

Frank feels his body sag a bit. Exhaustion re-settles into his limbs of its own accord -- the odd, near psychosomatic realization that perhaps he really _has_ just found himself amidst too-kind strangers. 

He tries not to think about the rest of it.

“I wasn’t really,” Frank says. “Only just … fading in and out. I never realized the moon was made of frogs.”

Joe steps back over and busies himself untying and retying Frank’s sling, such that his arm is held in a more secure, higher position. Frank tries not to grunt in pain; it doesn’t really work.

“Oh, don’t mind Brianna. She’s only nosy ‘cause her heart’s as big as her jackrabbit mouth.”

“I see.”

“Gets it from her parents.”

“They seem a decent sort.”

“Can’t find better from here to the Potomac. Now then,” Joe says. Again, there is a shrewd look in his eyes, far more knowing than Frank is comfortable with. “You better get some rest, Frank Randall from Boston, or you’ll think yourself to death. Don’t be worryin’, now. In a few days time you’ll be plenty healed up. Maybe even good enough to travel again. Ain’t that somethin’?”

“Yes,” Frank says, feeling slowly more and more as though he’s sinking leaden into the soft cot beneath him. “Yes, it’s … something. Thank you, Joe.”

Joe grins, and with one last pat on Frank’s good shoulder, he turns and leaves the surgery.

He’s left alone. Without Joe’s easy chatter, he can hear the soft creak of the wooden walls, the gentle crackle of the fire, and the faint, near-inaudible nickering of horses outside. The grinning face of the boy in the drawing looks at him from across the room, familiar and unfamiliar at once, dated boldly and cheerfully at the bottom of the page in two-dimensional, static mockery of his life’s work.

Perhaps if he closes his eyes again, Frank thinks, he will wake up in his office, and this will all fade to nothing but an amusing memory.

Frank is dozing, only half aware of his surroundings, when he is rudely awoken by loud yelling somewhere very close by.

His eyes open to the same things they closed to: the cedar-wood walls, the messy work bench, the twine-bundled herbs on the mantle. Only now, instead of the room being cool and quiet, cushioned against the noises of the outside world, its doorway is filled with the scuffling limbs of youthful bodies, and shocked voices shouting rather incoherently over one another.

The red hair catches his eye first. It’s the girl from before -- _Brianna_ \-- who so easily skipped around Frank’s cot, apple in hand, like a coltish version of a Greek wood nymph. He remembers with the sluggish speeds of after-sleep the scribbly signature on the charcoals; _her_ work, it would seem, and evidently special to the master of the little surgery.

But that is a piece of information becoming rapidly irrelevant with every passing second. 

Brianna’s presence would be relatively understandable -- perhaps she’d come back to nose further, or she had some business with Joe, close as they seemed through Frank’s snatches of half-conscious memory -- but Joe is nowhere to be seen, and against all explanation, Brianna herself is awkward wing to an alarming tableau, wherein she is tugging sharply but rather ineffectually on the stiffened shoulder of a young man not overly tall in stature but certainly assured in his stance and posture, clearly mid-way through trying to push himself in through the door. He has floppy brown curls tied at the nape of his neck that now swoop to fall dynamically over his brow as they are caught in the middle of the aborted struggle; large, thick-lashed eyes that are even larger now in agitation; and skin that has paled considerably under its healthy tan.

And he is staring directly at Frank, refined features coloured by a curdled swath of confusion that Frank realizes with slow-dawning distress is not confusion at _all_ , but rather the manifestation of a very raw and obvious emotion:

 _Fear_.

“-- cannot be here because he is supposed to be _dead_! _Je sais ce que je vois_ , let me _go_ \-- I will kill his devil ghost so Milord will not have to --”

“Fergus!”

“-- has gotten _in_ tae you?!”

“Are y’completely mad!”

He is being pushed back not only by Brianna, but by two other young bodies: a gangly youth with reddened, spotted face and stringy blond hair, and a fair-haired, round-cheeked girl whose head comes up only to the middle of the young man’s chest, but who is exclaiming loudly enough for someone thrice her size and stumbling over her skirts to block his way into the room. At their feet bounces around the anxious figure of a child, halfway in the middle of asking, “ _Bree, Bree, what’s goin’ on?”_ for the fourth time when Frank’s panicked mind registers the familiarity of his gap-toothed mouth: 

It’s the same little boy from the portrait on the wall. 

Blinking rapidly against the onslaught of nonsensical new information, Frank only barely catches the tousled dark head of Roger, lagging somewhere behind the tangle in the doorway, yelling to be heard over the rest.

“He hasna _done_ anythin’ _t’anyone_ , ye _numpties_ , are ye lot all out of yer minds entirely?!”

“I say,” Frank starts, mouth finally catching up to his spinning head. He scrambles to find his composure. “I don’t understand --” 

“-- _dead_ , I know he’s dead -- you are _not here!_ ” 

“Bree --”

“Willie, get Joe!”

“Get _Da_!”

“ _Oof_ , yer on my _foot_ , Ian!”

“ _Bastard!”_

“Stop it, the both of you!”

“Let me _go_ , Marsali --”

“What in _Christ’s_ name is goin’ on in here?!” thunders a new voice.

It’s gruff; deeper than any of the children’s. It slices through the hubbub like the clean edge of a sharpened knife, wetted daily and maintained with care, but rusty still from overuse. Frank watches mutely as an older man, moppish in his greying hair and lionish in his salt-and-pepper beard, pushes aside the half-drawn flap of the curtain before making an attempt to part the tangled youths in the doorway.

“Ye canna be raisin’ such a ruckus jest twa steps from the stables, ye ken ye’ll spook the mares -- weel, out wi’ it, what’s wrong then?” 

He stops right in the middle of the doorway, back turned to Frank, and eyes the distressed crowd with the judicious, corralling gaze of someone of relative authority and habitual familiarity, standing tall enough above the rest to successfully achieve a proper stare-down. Somehow, he exudes the air of a man who has had to deal with an event like this not once, but indeed _many_ times before.

“Out _with_ it, ye wee gomerels, we havenae got all day!”

 _Scots,_ offers a somewhat useless voice at the back of Frank’s mind, perhaps in the sole corner that is not scrambling to make sense of whatever is happening before him and studiously ignoring the increasing evidence that he is stuck in the midst of a very elaborate and meticulously detailed historical reenactment. _Why does it always come back to the bloody Scots_?

“He is a devil come back from the grave to curse us!” blurts the first young man, at the same time the younger of the boys yells, “Fergus’s lost his mind completely, is what’s happened!” and poor Roger, from the back, says, “Please sir, my Uncle hasna even ever missed his taxes!”

The old man ignores the latter two cries and turns to the boy called Fergus, frowning under his bushy eyebrows.

“ _Air sgàth an tighearna_ , get ahold of yerself lad! Yer white as a sheet, Fergus, what’s gotten intae you?”

“Murtagh, you must understand --”

Then the old man turns, and catches sight of Frank. 

In a last ditch attempt to recover himself, Frank sits up on the cot and tries to address the old man directly.

“Excuse me, but I really don’t know what --”

“ _Thighearna ar dìon_.”

In an instant, his grumbly, raincloud expression has vanished into something pale-eyed and sharp jawed, and he has stepped in front of Fergus -- behind whom, in turn, is the clamouring assortment of wide-eyed young people -- as though bodily protecting them. One hand flings out to sweep around the tow-headed assembly still hovering behind him and the other reaches down to close over what Frank realizes, with the first swoop of tangible fear in his stomach, is the very real pommel of a very real, very authentic long-bladed dagger strapped to his thigh. 

_Good Lord in Heaven._

“ _What_ \--” 

“I dinna ken if ye’re ghost or demon,” growls the old man, looking straight at Frank with an intense, tangible disgust that leaves Frank’s already throbbing head spinning. “But ye have thirty seconds tae explain _who_ ye are an’ why yer darkenin’ this family’s doorstep again afore I use my dirk tae cleave yer worthless body clean in two.”

Frank begins stammering, which only seems to make things worse.

“I -- I -- I -- I don’t know _who_ you think I am, but I swear to you, I am a loyal citizen of her majesty’s crown --”

“A redcoat!”

“Shall we throw him in the barn, Uncle Murtagh?”

“Aye, that’ll serve him --”

“He’s _hurt_ , Ian, why would we --”

“ _Thirty seconds!_ ”

“I’m Frank!” Frank yells, pressing himself as close to the wall behind him as humanly possible with one arm immobilized and the rest of him tangled in starchy bedding. “Frank Randall! _Please!_ ”

Everyone freezes. 

Or rather, the old man has frozen; the rest of the lot seem to have been stunned into an uncomprehending silence, glancing at once another and mouthing in confusion. Frank watches, breathing heavily and with sweat beading at his temples, as the man’s steely expression wavers, then turns to one of outright perplexity -- and then, with the slow dawning of a particularly ornery sunrise, clears into a weak-legged, odd-looking thing that leaves Frank feeling even more unsettled than before.

From the other side of the door, there is the faint sound of birds chirping, as though everything going on in this cursed cabin is suspended in a reality far away from the real world of the outdoors.

The old man says -- very slowly, as though barely able to believe it himself --

“... _Claire’s_ … Frank?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Franks says, hardly realizing what is coming out of his mouth. “Sir, I really haven’t the faintest idea who you are, and I was assured by one Joe Abernathy that neither I nor my companion would come to any harm. I really must insist that --”

But now it feels as though he is being ignored altogether.

“Brianna, _a leannan_ , where’s yer Da?”

“He was helping Isaiah wrangle the milkin’ cow, ‘cause she broke the fence again,” says Brianna, doubtful note in her voice. Her bright eyes flick sharply between the man purportedly her Uncle and Frank’s prone, bewildered body on the cot. “Uncle Murtagh --”

“Fergus,” says the old man, ignoring her, turning and taking the boy firmly by the upper arms. “Listen tae me -- _look_ at me, lad. _Va chercher ton père et reste avec lui jusqu'à ce que je te récupère._ Ye hear me?”

“But --”

“It isna him, aye? ‘Tis no’ the same man -- come on now --” He pulls at the boy’s shoulders with rough, brusque movements that bely deeper, long-held care. One worn hand comes up to grab the young man’s face and forces him to meet his eyes. “ _Fergus_.”

“But how can we _know_ that --”

“Ye’ll do as I say, or I’ll give ye a thrashin’. Go on, _a balaich_.”

The young man casts another mistrustful look towards Frank.

“Aye,” Fergus says finally, voice pale and uncertain. Then, with one last doubtful look, he stumbles backwards, past the congregation, and away and out the door.

The old man turns back to face forward. Without taking his eyes off of Frank, he crosses his arms over his chest, and addresses the girl once more.

“Bree. Go fetch yer mother.”

“But --”

“ _Chan e còmhradh a tha seo_. _Now_ , Bree.”

Brianna, too, throws her own suspicious look in Frank’s direction, before she turns tail and slingshots out of the doorway with the grace of a small antelope. 

The remaining children have seemed to take this as cue to start yelling again.

“-- said he is --”

“Uncle Murtagh!”

“Will Mama know what t’do?”

“What’s goin’ _on_ \--”

“-- _told_ them they shouldna been yellin’ --”

“-- canna just keep us here against our will!”

Belatedly, Frank realizes that his own voice has decided to join the fray.

“-- know what you think you people are playing at, but I am a well-respected professor of history at Harvard and I hardly think that any of this -- this -- this _production_ you have going on is acceptable in the least! I’m an academic! I don’t know _who_ hired you -- what are you, actors? That one there’s a child -- perhaps I’m dreaming, where’s Roger -- I _know_ when people are lying to me, my good man, and truly remarkable as these set pieces may be, there is no other earthly explanation for -- for -- well I demand to be heard and _released_ , damn you, or merely to just _wake up_ \--”

“-- darling, you have to tell me what’s going on -- is someone hurt? Joe said he set a broken arm --”

The door opens again, and a woman stands frozen immediately at the threshold. 

Frank has always considered himself a rational sort. Whereas some of his peers have expressed playful, tongue-in-cheek observation of the mythical or otherworldly, Frank has always insisted -- to himself, and once upon a time to the woman whose name the old man had invoked -- that he approaches even the loftiest narratives with the clinical eye of a third party observer. Poetry has never quite been in his repertoire, and religion only perfunctorily so, and any inclination towards the less than parsimonious has been snuffed out by years of solitary work and the approving nods of his colleagues, equally righteous in their belief that they are _men of reason_.

That sodding Robert Frost poem, he thinks, is a grand example of just that.

In this moment, however, all rational infrastructure held carefully within Frank’s academic mind has taken the proverbial leaping dive right out of the open window that stands just above his cot.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” says the woman.

“Quite,” says Frank.

And then, staring at the willowy, wide-eyed figure of his long-lost wife, he promptly passes out.

\- II. -

There is a small pendulum clock sat atop the cluttered top shelf in the kitchen. Its metronome ticking allows a special kind of quietude to fall over the place; not truly quiet, for the distant sounds of outside life and cheer are once again melting into the corners of his awareness. But gently, like a summer blanket spread over a bed.

Frank always remembers Claire as young -- impossibly so, perhaps even younger than the day she disappeared, closer to the version of her that had agreed to marry him at nineteen. At a glance, she seems to have remained so. Her hair is still that untameable mass of curls, now piled and pinned at the top of her head in a messy updo. The apples of her cheeks still round overtly with her smile. When she burns the tip of one finger on the kettle, her mouth still pinches down and backwards the same way, not quite successfully biting back a colourful curse. 

She’d always had an ageless sort of quality to her; some intangible, clinging thing that made you feel vaguely as though you’d blink and she would remain the same for always, elegant and impish at once. Liable to one day simply float away with it, weightlessly, into the clear autumn sky. 

She leans down to stoke the fire, and Frank thinks abstractly that he had been wrong in that assessment. The woman in front of him is by no means old. Perhaps she will never be _old_. But she has fine crow’s feet permanently decorating the corners of her eyes. Careworn hands that are chapped around the nail beds push her sleeves up to her elbows. There are streaks of silver in her hair that glimmer almost invisibly where the light from the window catches them. 

And there is something grounded about her, earth-hewn and solid and unchangeable, that had not existed in the nineteen year old girl who once told him she loved him.

“I’ve made us tea. I’d offer you whiskey, but we’ve been trying to make our own, and at this point in the process it might burn a hole right through your esophagus.”

There’s an apologetic note to her voice. She’s just finished moving around the kitchen as though its different component parts are extensions of her own fingers, pulling out chipped clay cups and filling the space with the soft sound of crockery scraping against wood. Now, she returns to the table, and sits down across from him.

“So you didn’t come back because you fell in love.”

She had spoken for nearly an hour. The clock on the mantlepiece ticked, and Frank forgot just a little about his bruised person and spinning head, and listened. 

_I came upon the tallest stone, and raised my hands to touch it, as if in a dream._

Shapes and colours fill his head -- that moment with Roger by the cave on the beach. Is that why he hardly understood what had happened?

Maybe in a different life, he would not have believed her. Right now, sitting in this kitchen that feels somehow suspended out of time, he rather thinks that whatever other version of him _wouldn’t_ is a fool.

“Drink,” Claire says, pushing the cup closer to him and leaning forward. There’s a soft crease just between her brows. “Your body needs fluids, given everything that’s happened. I’m sure I have honey somewhere in here --”

“Claire,” he says, and then, less sharply, “please. I’m -- fine.”

Fine is an interesting word. Mostly what he feels is that he’s observing their entire exchange from a few yards above the table. Floating in the rafters, perhaps. Or by the candelabra. The cup she has pushed towards him has little leaves carved into the rim. For some reason, this is all Frank can focus on, the rest of reality looming large and untouchable around him.

“I’m just ... simply trying to understand it all,” he says, staring at those little leaves. “Quite a thing to wrap one’s head around, Claire, I -- I’m sure you understand.”

Claire does not say anything, but takes a quiet sip of her tea.

“I suppose I should thank you for rescuing her from my apparent brute of an ancestor,” Frank says, toneless, after a moment. 

The old man named Murtagh, who has been sitting stoically in a corner of the kitchen atop what appears to be a crate of potatoes through Claire’s entire retelling, does not say anything, but only raises one caterpillar-like eyebrow. His eyes have been trained carefully on Frank this entire time, and he does not show any signs of letting up now. Frank is no fool; it’s clear that the care he feels for the woman who was once his wife is genuine, and the unspoken warning very real. He’d taken up the position without discussion from the moment they’d entered the house, the children and Roger herded out with efficient, practiced directives, and Claire had not objected. 

“Frank,” she says again, after a moment.

He _wants_ to be angry. To be resentful of her, as though that might make all of this easier. For whatever reason, he just -- can't.

“Good God Claire," he suddenly blurts. "Did you really try to stop the Rising _twice_?”

“More than that,” she says, her expression clearing into a sheepish smile.

“But _how_? The -- the -- God, but there must have been hundreds of details leading up to the bloody thing. Main events, perhaps -- but how might one have anticipated the exact turn of one’s actions? You suggested targeting high-ranking officials, but even then, the political unrest -- and none of the clans could fully agree -- I don’t --”

“ _Now_ he comes an’ says all this,” says Murtagh from the corner, in distinctly unimpressed tones. Claire only shakes her head.

“I can assure you, it was just as stupidly complicated as you think.” She’s smiling, as if his clinging to the history he’s so comfortable with is expected, but there’s a faint imprint of something deeper behind her eyes. Her fingers fiddle with her wedding ring, a habit that he remembers she’s always had. But now, instead of the old gold that still adorns her left hand, her thumb presses over the textured curve of a heavier, grey-ridged band. “I sometimes wish if I could turn back time, I’d tell us to run away, have nothing to do with it, but I --” 

She stops suddenly, startled, as though just realizing what it is she’s said. Claire’s skin has always been fair, but she looks a shade paler still in the soft kitchen light. He can’t tell what it is she is regretting.

“Claire,” he says, a bit stupidly.

“I’m --” She closes her eyes, tightly, then opens them again. “I’m _sorry_. I am so sorry for any hurt I might have caused you, Frank. But if I’d come back, I -- by the time I had the chance, it would only have caused all of us pain.”

 _All of us_.

“So -- the -- children, I take it. At the surgery. Er -- Brianna, and -- Willie --”

“And Fergus,” says Claire, with the assured immediacy of motherhood.

Frank swallows, his throat twinging uncomfortably over the indecipherable lump in its middle.

To say that he had not thought of Claire in the years since she disappeared would be an out-and-out lie. Frank acknowledges this now, within the four walls of this brightly-lit, earth-toned kitchen, and stares down at his hands. Of course he had thought of her. Even after he had spent his feelings of loss, his bafflement at the turns of the world, his hurt at the possibility of her willful betrayal, he thought of her every so often, like the memory of an idea. 

A bird in the window would pass and he’d remember she liked the colour blue. He’d see the horrible scrawl of a colleague’s handwriting and remember that Claire’s, too, was nearly illegible. They were -- flippant thoughts, perhaps. Not wholly deliberate. He had moved on with things, and lived it in relative comfort.

So to say that he had spent his life mourning her would also be a lie, and he sits now in her kitchen and does not know how to feel.

_I told him the truth, and he took me back to the stones. But I --_

_Yes?_

Somehow, he had known what she was going to say.

 _I fell in_ love _, Frank_.

“You’re still not telling me everything,” Frank realizes, not quite knowing why that is a problem. He shifts with the discomfort of it, frowning at her from his seat. The bandages under his sling feel tight, in a dull sort of way. 

Claire pulls back, her mouth folding in on itself in a thin line.

“It’s not only my story to tell.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Claire --”

From his corner, Murtagh makes a noise of displeasure, but Claire quells him with a look.

“Drink your tea,” she says.

“You cannot -- I am trying to _understand_ , here. I don’t -- 

She had never been a particularly homey type. Frank remembers this now, with the disquieting lick of a memory in which his erstwhile internal monologue does not come out favourably. Had he expected such a thing from her? Did he lament its loss? She still isn’t _homey_ ; something about the long-fingered sureness of her hands gives it away. But as she gets up and begins to move around once more, checking the oven and attending to an errant jar of open preserves, it is clear she is friends with the kitchen, and its knick-knacks and cupboards and firepit, the heavy pots hung from the wall and the water she has set to boil for them.

She returns, honey in hand, and sets it down in front of him.

“Frank,” she says, gently.

He feels himself sag against the carved wooden chair he is seated in.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Claire says, after a moment. She cradles her teacup with both hands, looking neither sad nor angry. There is only a gentleness to her face, a sort of empathy that perhaps he always knew she possessed in their youth, but hadn’t ever the chance to see in full bloom. “But I’ve found,” she continues, “these past several years, that belief is a more or less meaningless term.”

She gives him a long look, searching. 

“To have _faith_ in something -- that is a conscious, knowledge-driven act of love.”

 _I fell in love, Frank_.

It does not hurt as much as he expected it to. And yet ...

He looks up at her.

“Why am I _here_ , Claire?”

From outside, there is the bright-eyed sound of children, and the keening cry of an unfamiliar bird.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t -- I asked myself that so many times, in those first few months. I thought perhaps --”

Whatever it is she was going to say, she never finishes; at that moment, there is the distant slam of a heavy door, and footsteps, and a man’s voice sounds from the hall just outside the kitchen.

“-- aire? Are ye in there, Sassenach? The weans were gettin’ worried, so I came t --”

It’s deep, closer to a baritone than a tenor and unmistakably suffused with warmth. It never finishes its sentence, because in a fluid movement that is difficult to follow, Claire has slipped from the table out into the hallway. The footsteps stall, and a gentle murmur of voices melt into one another, indistinguishable from the next room. 

Frank stares mutely the table. There is a small scratch just to the left of the honey jar, and a chip in the corner of the plate Claire’s cup rests on. The carvings of leaves are amusingly reminiscent of the Rococo style, though Frank supposes _he_ is certainly no critic, but they are done with a careful hand that leaves the edges of some more roughened than others. Handmade, perhaps? Of course, he thinks -- how foolish. Where would they have _possibly_ found mugs as nicely-made as these in colonial North Carolina --

A floorboard creaks at the far end of the kitchen, and Frank looks up.

In Claire’s narration, she had described him in broad, characteristic strokes. A young Highlander boy who offered to marry her to keep her safe. Honest and honourable, selfless and kind. Abstract attributes that Frank supposes he understood somewhere in the back of his mind, but did not have the wherewithal to apply to a tangible, physical person. 

The man standing in the kitchen now is nearly tall enough to necessitate ducking under the doorway. His broad shoulders are covered by a simple shirt and vest, buttoned modestly at the neck under his kerchief, and his sleeves are rolled up at the elbows. Evidently, he has just been outdoors, and Frank remembers absently the comment about the errant milkcow -- the knees of his breeks are covered in grass stains, and his hands smudged with black earth that has also made its way to once cheekbone and the bridge of his nose. His curling hair and bright eyes give him a boyish look that Frank can’t help but feel will never go away, but he has the same sharp features that Brianna had: clever brows, high cheekbones and strong jaw, and thick auburn hair that falls the same way as his daughter’s. It’s tied loosely at the nape of his neck, as Fergus’s was, and a somewhat unevenly cut fringe rests above one eyebrow. He has ears that stick out just a little bit; a mole on one cheek, and spotty facial hair that doesn’t seem to grow evenly; and, while sharp and strong, the bridge of his nose has clearly been broken once before. 

There’s something about the way he holds himself, though, that supersedes any physical attributes -- as though he is a man who knows his own worth, and can coax that same self-knowledge out in others. 

He takes a deliberate step forward, a subconscious movement to place himself in front of Claire that might be missed by even the most careful of observers. His eyes flicker with something unknown when they land on Frank, and a sliver of tension ripples through his shoulders. But it disappears as quickly as it came, and he inclines his head, a genuine, warm sincerity in his voice when he puts out one large hand and says:

“James Fraser. ‘Tis verra nice tae finally meet ye … _Frank_... Randall.”

Dinner is a loud affair.

Fraser sits at the head of the table, adjusted slightly to the right to make up for the additional places set. Consequently, he is bumping elbows with the eldest boy -- the same young man of pale face and frantic eyes who had nearly attacked Frank in the surgery, whom Murtagh had called Fergus. He appears far more at ease now, though is studiously avoiding Frank’s eye with a casual grace that very nearly covers all feelings of unrest, and is well-occupied in a quick-fingered, giggly game of slipping sweet tarts to the youngest children and intermittently flicking crumbs at Brianna. She sits across from him and flicks crumbs back. Roger is wedged in between Brianna and Claire, looking less overtly alarmed than earlier but shooting Frank regular bewildered looks. On the other end of the table is the sharp-tongued young woman from the surgery ( _Marsali_ , Frank remembers), and a smaller, eleven-year-old version of her that seems to be her younger sister, and recipient of the majority of Fergus’s tarts. Mrs. Flannigan, an old Irishwoman who wears spectacles so thick Frank can hardly see her eyes and who is purportedly the housekeeper, sits on the girls’ other side, right beside Murtagh, whom Claire had said was Fraser’s godfather. 

Somehow, amidst all the rest, the tiniest cat Frank has ever seen is running around under everyone’s feet -- “Adso never _grew_ ,” Bree says gravely -- and there is some sort of secretive unspoken ritual afoot where various family members will smuggle bits of the meal to the cat all the while pretending they have not.

Frank himself is placed between the blond-haired boy named Ian and William’s curly little head, which at aged ten and a _half_ (as he is very quick to remind the assembly) comes up only to his mid-shoulder. 

“Joanie an’ I ran away from home last year an’ brought Ian with us,” Marsali is explaining, in the self-assured tones of a seventeen-year-old girl, as Claire hands down a bowl of soup and Mrs. Flannigan asks for the fourth time whether Fergus might repeat himself from the other end of the table. 

“Our new Da was lousy,” Joan confirms, through a mouthful of tart.

“That isna true! I mean, it _was_ true about their Da, but _I_ was lookin’ tae find adventure over the sea, like a _man_ , ye ken, an’ so I offered my protection --”

“Och, come off it Ian, ye would’ve died four times without them.”

“ _All_ of you were absolutely foolish for setting off on your own and _no_ one shall be doing anything like that again anytime soon --”

“Pass the mushrooms, please!”

“-- _miracle_ you made here alive -- Bree darling, Fanny was wondering when you’d like to go over and visit the new baby.”

Brianna has changed out of her ill-fitting blouse and breeches into a simple blue dress for dinner. She had until this moment been eyeing Frank suspiciously over the rim of her soup bowl -- with an observant sharpness to her gaze that mimicked her father’s, but was rather less capably hidden -- but at Claire’s words she seems to completely forget her mistrust, mouth dropping open in what appears to be sheer transcendent delight.

“Oh, did she _really_ Mama? I’ve been dyin’ t’meet her --”

“Will she make the same funny noises Bonnie does, Da?” 

“It wasna a long delivery then? Gail said it took near twelve _hours_.”

“Och, poor _Fanny_ \--”

“I’m sure she’ll be the fair sweetest bairn in th’ _world_ ,” Bree is explaining, rhapsodic, to a startled-looking Roger sat conveniently just beside her, “‘cause Fanny an’ Isaiah are her parents, of course, but also I ken she will ‘cause her sister Bonnie’s just so _darling_ \-- she’s these lovely wee curls, like Willie’s, ye see, but they’re almost three times smaller --”

“So, like Isaiah’s, you mean,” says Fergus innocently. Beside him, Fraser gracefully hides a smile behind his mouthful of flatbread.

“Aye, that’s exactly it!”

“Joanie, try not to knock your peas onto Adso’s head --”

“Can y’hear what they’re sayin’, Mister Murtagh? My poor ears jest aren’t what they used t’be --”

“I suppose Willie’s hair is also like Isaiah’s, only three times bigger,” Fergus starts, but is cut off by a covert pinch to his side from his father, who is in the middle of asking Frank to pass the butter. 

“What? Oh -- right, yes, sorry --”

The butter is in a wooden boat, with a small, equally wooden spoon sticking out of it. Frank tries his best to hand the thing over gracefully with one arm in a sling. He watches as Fraser takes it with a small nod, then sets it down abruptly in an aborted movement; Fergus has apparently pinched him right back under the table. There proceeds a small hidden scuffle of the muted habitual sort, with bumping shoulders and mouths curved against any laughter that might betray them, as Claire begins to ask Roger how he likes the tarts. She’s never quite gotten the recipe down, she explains -- are they alright? while Bree brings Murtagh and Marsali up to speed on the news in someone (her Aunt’s?) latest letter, which apparently includes talk of a young woman from Prussia who has discovered a celestial object. 

Bree is _very_ excited about this -- possibly even more than she is about the erstwhile baby.

“If ye need assistance wi’ yer fork, Mister Frank,” says Young Ian’s voice from beside him, “I’d be happy tae help ye. Ye ken, because of yer arm bein’ sae terribly broken an’ such.” 

It is well-intentioned, but rather too loud to be the quiet aside of someone who understands discretion.

“Oh,” says Frank. “No -- erm, thank you, but I’m alright.”

Unbidden, his eyes drift back to Claire. Where he’s _known_ Murtagh has been keeping an overt eye on him, and Fraser a carefully hidden one, he can’t help but feel that here, in the middle of all these people, she has almost completely forgotten the strangeness of his additional presence. 

She leans over the table to swipe at an invisible crumb on Willie’s cheek, then laughs loudly at something Marsali has said, sweet and bell-like. Several times over the course of the evening, he has seen Fraser subtly roll his shoulder or twitch one hand, so minutely that it is nearly invisible; each time Claire has risen to attend to a dish or candle or cat-related issue, her slender fingers alight over the stretched wool of his vest or the curve of his knuckles, kneading habitually into unseen pressure points that she seems to know, innately, without looking. 

Her hands move so swiftly and assuredly, it is almost as though they are being carried by something bigger than simply Claire.

Frank swallows, and focuses back on the conversation, which has somehow arrived at the game of chess.

“-- bet Bree could beat Ian now, ‘cause she’s read that book Uncle Jamie got from the French traders back tae front at least twelve times.”

“Bree has been able to beat Ian since before Ian was born, _ne plaisante pas_!”

“Tha’s no’ true!”

Fraser has his glass lifted halfway to his lips, but pauses it now, to raise a pleasantly inquiring eyebrow across the table. 

“D’ye play, Frank?”

Frank makes an odd noise at the back of his throat and tries to remember the last time he actually sat at a chess board. 

During last year’s faculty meeting, perhaps -- or was it Christmas?

But, 

“Oh, _no_ ,” Claire is saying, in knowing tones. She has gotten up to clear away some of the used plates, and light a few candles by the mantlepiece, and looks back now with somewhat comically raised eyebrows. “ _Don’t_ let him con you into playing. The last time you played against a new opponent,” she continues, now to Fraser, “it was that awful Governor in Wilmington, and you won so smugly that he nearly had us all arrested.”

“‘Tisna my fault I’m a man of integrity. He shouldna expected me tae let him win.”

“The only person who c’n beat Da at chess is Mister John,” Willie informs Frank solemnly. “Bree says when she was wee we burned his house down, but now he comes ‘round for dinner sometimes an’ Mama’s tryin’ t’find him a fella.”

“ _Willie_.” Fraser’s hissing tone is accompanied by a look of wide-eyed parental warning. “ _Na bruidhinn mu chùisean teaghlaich air beulaibh choigrich_.”

“But Da! They’re no’ strangers. Mama _clearly_ kens them.”

Amidst the continued chatter of the other family members, Claire’s eyes meet Frank’s first, and then, flickering, Fraser’s.

A throat clears.

“So, ah, Roger. What is it ye do wi’ yer time, lad?”

If nothing else, Frank is slowly realizing, there is an ease with which James Fraser builds and carries rapport, drawing people warmly in and out of orbit as a person who has mastery of spoken word does.

“Oh.” Roger looks startled at being addressed so directly, a small flush creeping up his neck, but rises to the question as capably as he is able without fully understanding where they are. Frank supposes he shall have to explain some of it to him, later tonight. He is not entirely relishing the prospect. “I’m studyin’ history. Gettin’ my doctorate from -- the, the university in Edinburgh. But I’m on exchange for a year at Harvard, wi’ Uncle Frank. He’s a historian too, ye ken. One’ve the best I know.”

“There is a _Université_ in Boston?” Fergus asks, for the first time addressing one of their two directly. There’s a curious set to his brows, not quite of interest, but of pleasant surprise. “I did not know that.”

“Like the one Da went to in Paris!” says Brianna, rather more wide-eyed than her brother.

“Er -- I believe it’s Cambridge,” Roger says, looking back at Frank as though in confirmation -- but the confidence in his voice is growing. “Been around fer some years, has it no’?”

“An’ ye believe yer studies will serve ye well?”

“Oh, very much, sir. I’m interested in key moments of societal change wi’in Scotland’s history, ye ken, but in the St -- I mean, the colonies as weel. I was jest tellin’ Frank the other day ...”

Once more, an easy back-and-forth falls over the dining table. Majority of conversation does not seem to be directed _to_ Frank, but perhaps _at_ him -- as though his presence at the table has imbibed upon him temporary membership in the unspoken knowns and unknowns of the people around him, without necessity of mutual transaction. As has been the case nearly the entire evening, conversation begins and ends at half-points, picking up threads of ideas that have history rooted in other times and places. Hands are held and let go and objects passed forward and backward with a cadence that belies a routine, internalized and known only through experience, underneath the topmost layer of warm-bodied chaos.

Frank had been expecting awkwardness. This -- the embracing sincerity that surrounds him, dissolving into the burgundy-hued corners of the dining room and weaving its way into the very grain of the table’s wood -- is not naive or unaware of he and Roger’s presence, but chooses to enfold them within it on its own terms: unpretentious, deliberate, and kind.

The tail-end of the meal is reached, and chairs scrape against the floor as people rise to transition into the aftermath of dinner. Frank, halfway to his feet and about to politely engage in the knee-jerk ritual of thanking Mrs. Flannigan for her assumed role in preparations, finds himself suddenly adrift, staring. As dinner itself was filled with routine, so is its afterward. Fergus scoops up the cat, turning it upside down and cooing at it. Brianna has shimmied her way around the table and she and Joan have taken it upon themselves to stick their fingers in Murtagh’s bushy beard, exclaiming over new strands of grey to the sounds of his insincere grumbling. Willie, completely past his earlier chastisement, slips out of his chair and makes to run for the door. 

Frank watches as Fraser catches him around the middle mid-step and hauls him into his lap, with manifest ease and put-upon groan at once.

“No’ so fast then, I havenae seen ye all day!”

“Da!” His nose scrunches against the sound kiss placed against his temple, but he does not seem too intent on escaping; he settles on his knees over his father’s leg within a moment, the same beatific grin from the charcoal drawing in the surgery upon his dimpled face. So close together, the similarities between them are evident -- in their elfin ears, and the curve of the chin. In the peculiar way Willie’s chestnut hair, otherwise far more like his mother’s, parts over his forehead.

“Tell me what ye did today.”

“Oh! Joanie an’ I found a toad. He was sittin’ under Miss Mary’s water well, past the stables, an’ he had green speckles all over his head. I asked Joe about it an’ he said it’s got t’be an oak toad.”

“Is that so?”

“Aye.” William nods emphatically. “We were goin’ t’name him Ian, after Ian, but then Joanie said he could be a lass so we named him Lizzie instead.”

Frank looks up to see Claire watching him, dirtied dinner plate held carefully in her hands, an odd expression upon her face. 

He does not know what it means.

“Brianna,” she says quietly, still looking at Frank, “why don’t you and Marsali come help me show our guests their sleeping arrangements and prepare the spare cot for them. I’m sure they’re quite tired out.”

She looks away, toward where Fraser is sitting with Willie still held in his arms, and their eyes meet with an unfamiliar note. He cannot qualify _why_ ; he had been married once, after all.

“Fergus an’ Ian can help Mrs. Flannigan wi’ the washin’ up,” Fraser says, silently understanding and absorbing whatever it is in Claire’s face. “I’ll go see t’the animals.”

“Right then,” says Claire, and turns to Frank and Roger with a smile. 

They follow her upstairs, only two of the wooden steps creaking beneath their feet.

The next afternoon, Claire shows Frank around the Ridge, a loaded basket slung over one arm and her shawl left behind so as to not encourage the yellow-gold North Carolina heat.

They walk at a slow pace, partly in consideration for his still-achy person and partly because Claire stops every few moments to call hello to someone new. She points out landmarks -- buildings or trees mostly, otherwise related to an insignificant anecdote she holds close to her heart. She tells him of her patients, and the new microscope Lord John -- the chess player from last night’s dinnertime conversation -- shipped for her from England. She describes each of their neighbours with a near luminous warmth, something light and precise that cuts through the intense June heat and makes Frank unable to dwell on his own confused thoughts. Instead, he is introduced to ideas of people: Fanny and Isaiah, the runaway young lovers; Gail, Joe’s wife, whose penchant for numbers means it is she who looks over the ledgers to catch any mistakes Fraser might have made; Mary Hawkins-Randall, separated from her now-grown son and estranged from her family, having found her way to them by pure chance, and, apparently, Frank’s direct ancestor.

“Perhaps you oughtn’t meet her, though,” Claire says, tone sobering. 

She has a wealth of stories. About Brianna’s determination to invent the world’s strongest length of rope, meant to hold the accursed milk cow in its pen; the fact that Marsali has been sweet on Fergus since Hogmanay -- “and in grand young man fashion, he’s on another planet entirely,” Claire says, “but perhaps that’s for the best just now, as she’s still so terribly young --”; and William’s enduring fascination with amphibians.

She talks with ease, but there’s a deliberation to what she shares, like she is fiercely protective of its insides. 

Here, in daylight, some of Frank’s exhaustion and confusion of the day before has ebbed. Claire speaks so comfortably, like all of this is an intrinsic part of her, growing and knitting together as many pieces of a larger puzzle.The land is lush and wide enough to house a series of small cottages, a barn and stables, a growing field and the surgery, as well as the big house he is realizing sits somewhere at the far end of the place. Tall cedar trees stretch their prickly tops into the sky like in joyful prayer. A lush evergreen colour rings the perimeter of the place, then dots in between. Birch and willow, too, and other things Frank’s never learned the names of but Claire assuredly knows. Hadn’t she been interested in botany, all those years ago? 

It’s just wild enough to be thrumming with something compelling, and intangible, and restorative.

Somehow, he feels as though that thrum has translated itself into Claire.

He wonders again why he is here.

“Of course, you’ve already met Joe,” she is saying, gesturing with her free hand as they pass the wrecked fence. She’s dressed in the same bodice from yesterday, with the tiny primroses along the sleeves, but has an apron wrapped over her skirts now which has been dirtied by her morning chores and the grubby fingers of a colic-y baby. Tiny brass earrings, a feminine indulgence still infinitely practical as Claire is, dangle under her ears. A lopsided wildflower is stuck through the back of her hair. It was a gift from five-year-old Deliah Abernathy as they passed her, and Frank has the feeling Claire will not remove it from her curls until well into the evening, even after it’s wilted completely away. “I’ve never had a friend so dear. He and Gail arrived just about the same time we did, so they’ve half the land to themselves, and the tenancy is sort of spread between, but truly we make many of our decisions together. That’s the Beardsley cottage over there -- they’re the ones who just had their new baby -- and then the surgery is somewhere right in the middle of it all, for ease of access. Jamie built it for me just after the house was done. And there’s that bloody fence Annabelle keeps ruining -- she’s the cow -- her milk is wonderful but she’s aging me before my time, and our poor mare Bran as well -- nervous old thing -- we decided to raise horses, you see, because cows haven’t been domesticated here yet, but then there was this old German trader from Wilmington who had a milk cow of _all_ things and Jamie thought it would be grand to take her, and now all she’s done is be the world’s largest thorn in my side --” 

Claire stops, steps faltering, and looks somewhat sheepish.

“Is something wrong?” Frank asks, feeling suddenly out of his depth.

Perhaps he _is_. He feels a twinge of his lingering soreness. For all that he is a historian, so much of what Claire is showing him feels -- _forgein_. 

“Sorry,” Claire says. “I suppose I’ve started rambling. I don’t know that you’d be interested in much of this. Your historical knowledge was always battles and dates and such, wasn’t it.”

She follows this with the sweet smile of someone trying to offer an opening, or a kindness. Earlier, she had re-checked his set arm, and fussed over his bandages, but it was with the practiced efficacy of an experienced healer. 

He blinks at her now, bewildered. Under the hot sun, a soft breeze wisps through, bringing with it the combined smell of manure and honeysuckle. Vaguely, and maybe uncharitably, he wonders how Fraser feels about this jaunt of theirs, and then tries his best to push the thought out of his mind.

“Claire,” he starts, and does not know quite how to continue. They’ve passed the fence, and are approaching one of the fields, black and earthy in the sunlight. “This is … incredible.”

“How do you mean?” 

“I mean -- all these people, I -- well, does no one -- bother you all?”

Her brows flicker in a brief frown, before she lifts her shoulders in a determined sort of way. “Well ... no. Certainly, we’ve had incidents -- there was that awful gang, the ones who attacked you? They tried to torch the place while Jamie was away, but Gail and Ian managed to convince them that I was a witch, and they never came back.” Her smile is rueful, but not quite as assured as it was earlier. “Wilmington’s the closest town to us, and people just. Rarely venture over here. There’s the entire forest in between, you see -- the fact that we found you is nearly a miracle. And we’re not in Mohawk territory -- we _know_ , because they’ve told us -- and they do visit every so often, but it’s more for the company than it is for trade, and I -- we’re simply -- _here_.” 

Stray curls dance in the gentle breeze around her neck. She bites down on her lower lip, a nervous habit he does not remember her having. Here in the outdoors, he is struck again by how strange it is to see her, the same, yet different, all at once. 

He clears his throat, feeling somewhat awkward. “You seem terribly happy here, Claire.”

Claire looks at him, for a long moment. She says suddenly, 

“And you? Did you marry again?”

It is not a question Frank was at all prepared for. He stiffens, then flounders; does she want him to have? Will it allay some deeply-held guilt that he has been subconsciously hoping she holds?

Something about the sharpness of her eyes, not dulled at all the last eighteen years, makes him feel as though he cannot slip himself past her with the flippancies he sometimes offers his colleagues at those jovial holiday mixers. He’s always enjoyed those things in the past, but now, standing in the midst of the _realness_ of this surreal past, his memories of them hold so much superficiality that he does not know how to feel.

For the _millionth_ time, apparently.

“I -- I was engaged, for a time.”

“Oh?”

“I rather wasn’t -- as faithful as I ought to have been.”

“I see,” Claire says, quietly. 

Frank feels his neck heat with an awkward flush of shame that he has not experienced in a while. Somehow, the idea of letting this version of Claire down is jarring, and unwanted, a feeling rising with suddenness within him, just as the impulse to spite her memory has in years past.

“I’m a professor at Harvard now, though. Roger mentioned it a bit last night. Very lucrative position, you know -- I’ve a perfectly comfortable living on my own. And I’ve a housekeeper -- she manages my affairs and things, lovely old woman, husband passed during the war. Marriage just wasn’t for me, I suppose, and now I am married to my work.”

He says this cheerfully, the way one is supposed to deliver a well-known joke. Claire only looks at him, that same gentleness from the kitchen held in her already-soft features.

“Yes,” she says, with genuine warmth. “I’m sure you’re quite a famous historian now, doing all the genealogical research you ever dreamed of.”

He nods, because -- well -- it’s _true_. But he feels unanchored, suddenly. Held in this bubble of trees, reaching up towards the heavens, and people, reaching out towards each other, he suddenly cannot remember why he studies history. Claire was right; he _had_ always seen it as dates and battles. Large, significant events, marked by their politics and particulars, held stagnantly in the time they existed within.

What he is experiencing right now feels as though it is more of a tangible idea than an event, with eyes cast to what _could_ be with an earnestness and vision he has never felt before.

Unbidden, Frank’s mouth moves, and he finds himself saying,

“Why am I here, Claire?”

It comes out far less sharply than it had yesterday at the kitchen table. Claire inhales, deeply, then exhales. Her fingers go to her wedding ring again, worrying.

“Tell me again what you remember of what happened. I mean -- just before.” 

He huffs, aimlessly poking at a stray clod of grass with the toe of his shoe. He’s still wearing his Oxfords -- _they_ were not taken from him, at least. The rest of his clothing has been replaced with a spare set of Fergus’s, and Roger’s with Joe’s, but he still has his shoes. Young Ian had spent the entirety of breakfast that morning exclaiming over how odd, yet distinguished, they looked.

“I told you, there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. It feels like complete happenstance. We had some -- some time to kill, I suppose, and Roger wanted to explore the coves by the water’s edge, and the man at the tourist office told us to try this side of the bay. The first cove we tried sent us two hundred years into the bloody past.”

Claire sighs, and shakes her head, looking down.

“Then I really don’t know. I’ve never understood it myself. For a time, I thought -- _I_ had travelled so I might meet Jamie. I know, it sounds terrible of me to say that to _you_ , but -- but then, I didn’t think about it for a time, and … well, I’m not the only person who’s travelled through the stones, as you can see. And I don’t have an answer for it that’s bigger than simply myself.”

Bigger than simply herself. 

Everything about this place, about the story she has told him, feels bigger than simply herself. And yet -- intimately tied to her, to someplace deep within her soul, in ways that Frank cannot begin to comprehend. 

Frank opens his mouth -- surely Claire expects him to respond -- but in approaching the field the distant yells and laughter of the Ridge’s inhabitants have swelled to something much closer-by. Across a stretch of trampled furrows, there appears to be a broken wagon sunk and wedged deeply into the muck. A handful of men have gathered around it, and are in the middle of the apparently arduous task of unsticking it.

“Oooh,” says Claire, stopping short, “that _cow_.” 

It is so different from her earlier tone that Frank nearly laughs aloud. 

The wagon is on its side, with one wheel turning aimlessly in the air. He can see Fraser’s red hair on its far side, with one bare shoulder braced beneath it, holding the bulk of its weight as he calls out light-voiced directives to the other men. Joe is holding the left, his sleeves soaked with muck and clinging to his forearms, while Fergus and a brown-faced young man Frank thinks might be Isaiah attempt to dig beneath the most sunken wheel with shovels. 

He and Claire watch as the younger men drop their shovels with defeated groans, and Fergus reaches back to shuck off his dirtied shirt. 

In an instant, Claire is marching toward the wagon. She is halfway there before Frank fully registers it is she who is doing the scolding.

“Fergus Fraser, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times. You can’t go running around in this bloody hot sun without something to cover you -- or do you want to burn the skin right off your shoulders like your father does? All of you, you’ll toss your shirts away without a thought and then spend the next week haunting my surgery like overgrown _lobsters_ \--”

Swanning through the squelching mud without a second thought, her dragging skirts ignored, Claire inserts herself amidst the men’s sweaty, filth-filled work with a regimented ease. Fergus, perhaps knowingly, does not skip out of her reach in time, and is held firmly in place as she reaches into her mysterious basket of things and fishes out a little clay pot seemingly for this very purpose.

She proceeds to cover the young man’s shoulders and cheekbones with a glistening sort of salve not unlike petroleum jelly.

“Ah, _Maman,_ I will be _fine_ \--”

His good-natured groan is met with a resounding lack of sympathy. He scrunches his nose against her ministrations, then grins and wipes some of the excess from his own shoulders over her forehead. Claire’s responding laughter is like a bell.

Joe and Isaiah, too, are laughing, and Fraser grinning from the other side of the wagon. He laughs only when Claire turns to him, and ducks out from the wheel to sneak the pot out of her hands while she groans over his already-sunburnt shoulders.

If Frank were ever to feel truly insecure, it would be now. Tall and broad as the younger man was in the kitchen, here in the field it is obvious that Fraser is not only educated and intelligent, but unerringly well-made as well. It’s the sort of build that comes from a lifetime of honest, physical labour, lasting beyond the energy of youth and settling solidly into a defining part of a person. Everything about the man seems strong -- from his height to his mouth to the way his arms rest against the splintered wagon wood, and the tensile spring of his leg against the earth. He catches Frank’s eye, offering an awkward raised hand of acknowledgement, and Frank half expects then he will lean over and kiss Claire, or some other such nonsense, simply because Frank is there. He doesn’t -- only watches with a soft warmth in his eyes as she squawks over their poorer than average skincare.

Then he turns around, and Frank feels his entire person go cold.

 _Jesus Christ_.

The marks are faded and off-white, but webbed and etched so deeply that Frank is sure they will never go away. They span from his broad shoulders to the base of his spine, haphazard and inhuman. Frank has not seen scar tissue bigger than that of a long-forgotten cut on someone’s hand up close since his intelligence work during the War; even then, he had never seen anything like this. 

There’s a flippant brutality to it that leaves him weak-limbed and ill.

 _It’s not only my story to tell_ , Claire had said sharply in the kitchen.

Any petulant thoughts he might have had about the man fizzle into a sour taste at the pit of his throat. He watches mutely as Claire takes another moment to judge the men’s work, bemoan the cow, and tease Isaiah -- he grins a wide-mouthed, delighted thing that Frank barely registers -- and then finally turns to accost this man she’d called her husband. Fraser dances around her playful poking, effortless and joyful. As she starts to head back up the hill, he presses his lips cheerfully to her forehead, like a short-hand for thanks, and calls out after her a promise to do something about _that blasted cow ye hate on so_ , that he might win her favour.

They move so fluidly, even when they are tripping around in ankle-deep mud, that it ripples beyond just the two of them, into Fergus’s cajoling and Joe’s good-natured jibes. Into the structure of the cottages, built so carefully between the trees; the depth of the well, water-dark and cooling; the earthy tones of the little surgery, imbibed in every corner with love. Like last night at the dinner table, but -- more.

Bigger. 

There’s something very powerful about it all.

“Frank?”

He starts; Claire has made her way back to him, her cheeks flushed with her efforts. Her forehead glistens where her eldest son, so clearly a part of her in all but blood, had wiped his fingers. There’s something unidentifiable in her eyes as she watches Frank carefully, trying to read something that he himself doesn’t fully understand.

He swallows.

“I was wondering if I might -- have the chance to look around and observe some more,” he finally says. “And -- take some notes. If that’s alright.”

Claire’s expression softens. 

“Of course,” she says.

She steps forward to continue their walk. Inhaling, Frank follows her lead.

\- III. -

Claire has been having a recurring dream. 

In the dream, she is back in the glade she and Jamie stood upon when they first arrived in this place, looking towards the opening in the greenery that leads to the ledge overlooking the Blue Mountains. The colours around her are mellow and fluttery in a way that leaves her heart calm. The earth is cool beneath her bare toes. She’s wearing the white dress she wore, that day she went up the hill to pick the forget-me-nots. And there’s a man’s figure sitting on a log right at the ledge, looking at the mountains.

She can never see his face, but there’s something infuriatingly familiar about him. 

Claire does not appreciate the fact that she’s been having a recurring dream. The fact that she cannot for the life of her understand what it _means_ does not help matters.

“ _You_ have recurring dreams,” Claire insists rather breathlessly one night, long after the rest of the house is asleep, one leg propped loosely over her husband’s shoulder. “I don’t have bloody recurring dreams. I’m too practical a person.”

Jamie laughs so hard he nearly jostles them both off the bed.

She had awoken the previous Tuesday morning having had the same damned dream again, to the creeping purples of pre-dawn outside the bedroom window and Jamie’s heavy leg flung over her thigh, cutting off circulation. The air in their bedroom was cold -- she could feel it against her inhale -- but the rest of her was overheating, and so she’d shoved at Jamie’s shoulder.

He always woke up before she did; clearly, he was keeping his bloody leg over hers on _purpose_.

“I feel I may groan loudly if I try tae move,” Jamie had mumbled, somewhere into the depths of her hair. “Ye’re marrit to an auld man, Sassenach.”

“You’re not old. You’ve barely been forty a month.”

“Hmmm.”

“If you’re old,” Claire had said, “then I’m positively prehistoric.”

“Yer mouth smells awful, Claire.”

“Did I ask you to sit on top of me?”

“ _Cha mhòr gu bheil mi air do mhuin_.”

“ _English_ ,” Claire had groaned, because it was far too early in the morning, then, “You’re not old, because all the important bits are still in working order.”

Then she’d watched in slow motion as his eyes lit with the particular robin’s egg-blue glimmer that always preceded something ineffably crass.

“My --”

“-- _dazzling intellect_ \--”

“-- _Lord_ , Claire --”

“Get _off_ of me, you incorrigible man -- this is what I get for marrying a fool the size of a small draft horse --”

“A draft horse, ye say?”

She had sat up, letting the chill of the bedroom nip under her thin shift, letting her eyes trace the proud crests of his collarbone and the small spot under his chin that burned red with an awkward swipe of the razor the morning before. One of his arms was flung high above his head, over the disrupted pillows. She touched the faded marks on his open palm with fluttering fingers.

“Promise me you and Fergus shall come back from your hunt in one piece, and I’ll give you a massage.” 

“‘Tis no’ jest my shoulders that’re achin’.” 

“I’ll massage other parts of you, then,” she said solemnly.

They had gazed at each other, extended, for the number of heartbeats that abbreviated their many years together. Then, as one, they’d dissolved into helpless giggles.

That was Tuesday; Claire can’t help but feel like the last week alone has been longer than a few lifetimes.

It’s late evening now, and her turn to comb the sleepy insides of the house for anything amiss or needing correction before bed. She checks to make sure the kitchen fires are doused, then pushes Ian’s muddied boots closer to the wall. Passing through the study, she completes and folds up medicinal notes she had made that morning, scribbled on a corner of Jamie’s papers for lack of other place to write. He’ll be irritable about it tomorrow, no doubt, but she fishes his new reading glasses out from underneath a recent sketch of Bree’s and an errant stocking, comfortable in the knowledge that she’ll have ammunition with which to nag him right back. Spectacles in hand, she slips into the living room, and pauses; Fergus has slumped over asleep on the settee in front of the fire. 

Adso is curled atop his knees, and stares balefully up at Claire, playing miniscule protector.

Her heart clenches. Roger and Frank have been here near a full week now. This is the first time she’s seen Fergus at ease enough to fall asleep by the fire, instead of in his room. Threads of soft curls have slipped out from the neat ribbon that holds them, and his cheek is squished awkwardly against his own hand, with a thread of drool dripping down one finger. Vaguely, she wonders if he’s waiting for Jamie, who is in the barn now with Murtagh trying to settle one of the foaling mares.

She leans over and presses a kiss to her son’s warm forehead. Then she rights herself.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispers at the cat. “How could I have known?”

If Adso and his downy little head have an opinion on her stumbling defence, they don’t make it known. 

_Why am I here, Claire_?

Her first instinct upon seeing him had gripped the very depths of her marrow in iron. It was not fear like she was used to as a girl. It was of a different sort; all Claire had wanted to do in that split millisecond of time was to bare teeth, like a lioness she had seen once, travelling with Uncle Lamb. Or the female bear that Jamie and Murtagh encountered in the woods last autumn, shoulders hunched and sinuous, mouth snarling and ready to maim. 

Then she found her lungs again, and realized.

It was only Frank.

A little less hair on his head, perhaps; a little more grey at his temples. The furrow in his brow was deeper, though the bruising around his poor eye nearly covered it. But he had the same softness to the corners of his mouth, and the same awkward kindness in his eyes that Claire had cared for so long ago. 

Claire has not thought actively about the stones in years. She had made her decision, like a traveller at a crossroads, and not looked back. 

_Two roads converged within a wood_ , she remembers. She’d always rather liked that poem. She’d told Jamie about it, once, just the two of them, and his eyes had lit up at the gentle picture painted, at the weightiness of the narrator’s decision. 

Is it wrong of her, how little guilt she feels? She ponders this as she makes her way up the stairs. After the initial shock had passed, she had taken a moment simply to observe. Of the two of them Jamie is the more sharp-eyed, the more intuitively perceptive, but Claire has never been far behind; but for his injured arm and bruised brow, Frank had looked … well. Healthy, self-possessed, capable. He was still his practical self -- unintentionally aloof at times, and somewhat stiff when faced with the concept of Jamie Fraser, tall and assured and presenting that paradoxical combination of wariness and warmth that only Claire fully appreciated. But never _truly_ meaning badly. Overwhelmed, perhaps; _Claire_ of all people understood. 

But she had thought -- and this was an idea that dug its way under her skin -- that there was something more than that. 

Like he was lost, just a little bit, and not only in time.

In two days’ time, his arm will be healed enough to travel with, and he’s been quite insistent that he and Roger mean to leave the way they came.

Claire pushes these thoughts out of her mind. She’s just congratulated herself on skipping the stairs with the loudest creaks and making it silently to the landing when there is a rustle in front of her, so familiar in its movements that she knows who it is even in the near-darkness.

“Bree?” she whispers, gentle into the shadowy hall.

Bree is standing a few steps away from the girls’ shared bedroom, barefooted, a worn tartan blanket wrapped lopsidedly over her shift such that one end of it is dragging a little along the floor. With her long copper hair in the twin braids she still wears to bed, and the largeness of her forget-me-not eyes, she looks much younger than her energetic fifteen years.

“I couldn’t sleep, Mama.” It’s a wispy sort of declaration. Instinct Claire still does not fully understand takes hold underneath her ribcage. She steps forward, carding one hand through the loosened hair around her daughter’s delicate ear.

“Alright,” she whispers. “Shall we go to my room, then?”

The fireplace in the Laird’s bedroom is already lit, buttery and orange. It highlights the green of the drapes, deep and fir-coloured, and the mahogany of Claire’s tiny dressing table. It’s an easy move from the doorway to the bed. Brianna crawls atop the thin quilt, then wriggles her way underneath it, and peers out at her mother from beneath the cocoon of summertime bedding. It’s more or less a seamless ritual. Long-limbed and tack-sharp as Bree is becoming, she is still sweet in a way that tugs at the insides of Claire’s soul.

Claire unpins her hair, letting it fall loosely around her shoulders, then perches herself on the bed by Bree’s covered knees. Even under the coverlet, they’re lithe, and strong. She’s a far more athletic girl than Claire had ever been, and possesses none of the giraffe-like gracelessness of her own youth.

Bloody Fraser genetics. 

“Hi, Bumblebee,” Claire says. 

Oddly, Bree does not immediately respond, but continues to stare. She looks like she is searching desperately for something in her mother’s face. Her ruddy brows grow slowly more creased, and Claire can feel the knee under the covers, tense.

“Mama,” says Bree finally, in the tone of someone who has been ruminating upon something for days. “Are Frank an’ Roger really old friends’ve yours?”

Claire swallows. The fireplace casts a warm glow over Bree’s face, and lights up her fiery hair. She’s reminded of her early days with Jamie, in the pseudo safety of their Leoch rooms, the fireplace roaring. And then of the same flames in his hair last night, after she had lit a candle and placed an anchoring hand over his breastbone, breathing with him through the remnants of an infrequent night terror.

“From a very long time ago, yes, darling.”

“Oh. Roger said they mean t’leave in a few days.”

Stilling, Claire tries not to worry at her own lip. “Yes, they did tell me that. They didn’t quite -- mean to come here, Bree. It was just a happy coincidence. Is something wrong?”

“No,” says Bree. She still looks deep in thought. “They seem nice. Roger tells funny jokes.”

“Is that so?”

“He’s fair _strange_ , though.”

“Well, he didn’t necessarily grow up the same way as you,” Claire says, willing her voice not to halt. “Where he’s from, perhaps things are done differently.”

Bree mashes her lips together, nose wrinkling in thought, then finally nods. There are times where she is so heart stoppingly like her father, Claire is caught between the absurd double-urge to laugh and cry at once. She wonders if all parents experience such things.

Moving softly, Claire starts her own before-bed rituals, undoing her laces and combing through her tangled hair with her fingers. Bree is so quiet Claire thinks she’s fallen asleep. Then, into the calm of the bedroom, she says,

“Mama? What happened to them after?”

Claire looks over at her curiously. “Roger and Frank?”

“ _No._ I mean,” a slow pink grows in the tips of her ears. “Sorry. I meant -- in Da’s story, about the faerie. What happened to ‘em, after the end?”

The fire crackles.

“You mean,” Claire says slowly, “After they -- escaped?”

“Aye.”

For all she resembles Jamie, Brianna has never been able to master his inscrutability. Perhaps she is simply too young -- or perhaps, in this way, she takes after Claire. In the square lines of her face, softened with baby fat still, Claire sees the vulnerability of a child who is only just realizing she has not been trusted with the entire truth of her parents’ selves.

Claire’s hand trembles, against her own will. She never had such a moment, when she was a girl.

“Brianna,” she says finally. “Do you trust me?”

A flicker of confusion flashes indigo through Bree’s eyes. Then she says,

“Yes, Mama.”

Claire cups one of her cheeks in the curve of her palm, and traces the beloved shape of her daughter’s face with her eyes.

“Then I promise, one day, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay,” Bree says finally. “Can you -- could ye still tell me a story before bed?”

Claire exhales; loosens.

“Of course. But I’ll have to warn you, I’m not nearly as skilled at this as your father.”

“I _know_ , Mama --”

“Oh, you _know_ , do you? _I_ see how it is --”

“Ma- _ma_ \--”

“Yes alright, _alright_ , now, let’s see. Perhaps I’ll tell you one my Uncle Lamb used to tell me, when I was a girl. Many many years ago, in the olden times, there lived a young woman in what is now called the Ottoman Empire. Geography is very important, Bree, you should remember these things. Perhaps we might procure some sort of map -- I wonder if John might know --”

“The _story_ , Mama.”

“Right, yes, sorry. She lived with her father and sisters in a land ruled by a powerful king, and her name was Scheherazade. Now, one day, when the sun was high in the sky …”

Her own voice fills the room. Claire wonders once more what she is responsible for.

She is in the garden when Jamie finds her the next day, elbows-deep in weeding. His kerchief is undone, shirt open loosely at the neck, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. He’s just shaved this morning, and the smooth skin of his rosy cheeks makes him look younger, in a way that clenches deep in Claire’s belly.

Wordlessly, Jamie gets down onto his knees and finds an entrance into her routine. His large hands dig into the earth with swift movements that come more from intimate knowledge of sharp objects -- the knife in his hand -- than gardening know-how. But it allows her to execute the final act of _tearing out by the roots_ with more ease.

It’s a good twenty minutes before Claire stops and puts her trowel down. She leans backwards, squatting at the knees, and waits for Jamie to drop his own tool and arrange his long limbs -- as always somewhat comically large amidst her small vegetable patch -- into a crosslegged position.

“You’re taking this all terribly well,” Claire says. The corner of Jamie’s mouth twitches. He leans forward, propping his chin up on two knuckles.

“Oh aye?”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Claire. She frowns at him, tension clawing in her chest despite the heat of the outdoors. She fumbles for a moment, then tugs her gloves off and sticks her palms impulsively into the dirt at her sides.

“I dinna see why I should be behavin’ differently.” He cocks his head, grinning fully now, and says, “perhaps if he’d shown up when I was a penniless outlaw on the run through the moor --”

“Oh, _please_ \--”

“Were ye expectin’ I be more of a jealous beast, then?” he says, and without warning reaches over to capture her wrists and tug her forward, fast enough that she does not have the chance to right herself. Yelping, she falls sideways into his arms and feels her wide-brimmed hat fall off and into the dirt, and the pins in her hair loosen. Nose to nose now, Jamie offers her the most solemn expression in his arsenal. Then he waggles his eyebrows rather ridiculously before making an exaggerated growling noise deep from within his chest and pinching her sides, startling one of those breathy giggles out of her that she never quite expects to make. “More’ve a -- what was it ye once called me? Barbarian, aye? I think I’d be verra good at it if I tried, Sassenach, I willnae lie.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she says, unsure to what she’s referring.

“I ken. I was tryin’ tae make ye laugh.” 

Jamie smells of the effects of hot North Carolina sun and the stables and the crushed bergamot she insists on tucking into his clothes. She quiets, feeling all of the muscles in her face soften. Silly as his efforts were, she feels the points where their bodies touch now, and cannot describe the emotion that rises within her, can’t articulate exactly how it feels to have him holding her, steady and conscious, just inches above the damp earth.

She has seen so many versions of him over the years. Playful and irreverent, with those robin’s egg blue eyes. Steel-jawed as a force of nature, hair the colour of blood. Petrified boy, trembling like a leaf in her clumsy embrace. And gentle, stalwart protector, with split-open heart and tender touch, cupping the sweet faces of each of their children as the most precious of gifts in his hands.

Every version of him has dedicated itself, body and soul, to keeping her safe.

“Claire,” he says quietly. Everything feels quiet out here, amidst the herbs and the hot-hot sun, though it very explicitly isn’t; just past the small fence and the ivy can be heard the chatter of their tenants, and some of the boys in the field, and the excited shrieks of the children as they no doubt chase one of the dogs from one end of the Ridge to the other.

She knows Fergus had asked for Roger’s help in some chore or other, and that Frank is sitting by the water well nose-deep in his notebook. They’ll be leaving tomorrow, if all goes well. 

She thinks that she hadn’t shown Frank her garden, when they had their walk the other day. 

“I haven’t thought about the stones in a long time,” she says. 

“Aye.”

“I mean -- I haven’t thought about the _why_.” She looks up, and feels her lips pull back against the long-rested slosh of fear for an old, painful memory. “Not since -- when I told you, that it’s all been for me and you. Even when you tried to make me leave, I was only thinking about the how. I wasn’t thinking -- _why_ they’d brought me here, in the first place. And now --”

“Sassenach --”

“I know seeing his face isn’t easy for you -- I _know_ it’s not, don’t look at me like that, you've barely slept a wink all week and you've been trying to -- to hide it for my sake, you won't even make yourself scarce because of your damnable instinct to look out for us, and I -- I feel like I'm responsible, somehow, as though I should _know_ why he is here, so I could explain it to him before he leaves, so I might have -- I don’t know, expected it, and -- and protected you --”

“ _Claire_ \--”

“-- without feeling as though I’ve abandoned an innocent man a second time! And I never ended up giving you that bloody massage, either!” she adds, angrily. Even to her own ears, the combination of petulance and sincere tearfulness sounds somewhat comical.

“Claire,” Jamie says, one more time, a shadow of a laugh under his tone. He looks very much as though he does not know where, of all these many grievances, to start.

"I willnae lie," he finally says. "Seein' Randall's face again, I --" He breaks off, grimacing, and runs one hand over his face. The knots tied up in Claire's stomach tighten further. "But that isnae yer fault, Claire." 

"It's my _responsibility_ ," she insists, throat strained with the effort. 

“And how could ye possibly have managed such a thing?”

“I should have asked! I should have -- tried to understand, maybe, why I am here.” She runs out of steam, floundering like those frogs Willie loves so much. She gazes up at him. Absurdly, suddenly, she thinks of her dream, and the unknown man in the glade. Her frustration and anxiety ebbs into something softer. “Why they brought me to you. Why I _was brought to you_. Is that not something important to know?”

Jamie is quiet for a long moment. She can feel his heartbeat, slow and steady and real, against her arm. Everything about this last week has felt surreal; he has not.

Carefully, he pulls her upright, settling her just shy of his lap. His hands stay resting over her arms. He says,

“Can I -- tell ye somethin’, Claire? I dinna ken if it’ll answer yer question, an’ it may sound a wee bit daft.”

“I -- go ahead,” she says, faltering.

There is a smudge of dirt on Jamie’s cheek, perhaps from her own hands. She doesn’t know. He takes a deep breath, shoulders lifting, and says,

“Ye remember when we were in Edinburgh -- in the wee washerwoman’s rooms.”

“Of course.”

“There was a day I came home from the print shop, an’ ye were -- I dinna ken, standin’ at the fire, or some such thing. I can hardly remember what ye were doin’, or wearin’, or what ye looked like. Truthfully, ye must have been exhausted, an’ the bairns wouldnae stop chatterin’, and Murtagh still had his chest pains.” He’s looking at her so intently. Driven by something unconscious, one of his hands takes hers in his own, thumb sliding over the ridge of her ring. “But ye -- ye stood, Claire. An’ I swear in that moment, I thought -- it was like the light in the room was comin’ from someplace inside of ye, instead of the fire. _Sorcha_.” He laughs, rueful. “‘Tis fitting, I suppose.”

“Jamie,” she whispers.

He only shakes his head very softly, and reaches up his free hand to tuck a loose curl behind her ear. 

“I though tae myself then, _mo ghraidh_ , that -- whatever else happened, I’d die a happy man if I’d see that same light comin’ forth from my children. And -- it _does_ , Claire. I see it an’ thank God every day. An’ no’ jest in the weans, but -- but in Joe and Gail, as well. In Marsali an’ wee Ian, daftie as he may be at times. In that young Isaiah an’ his wife -- _Lord_ , I see it in Murtagh, Claire.”

Around them, the birds twitter.

She remembers a thought she had had, so very early in their marriage, as they lay loose and happy by the mill at Lallybroch. Jamie was so good at loving people. She had thought perhaps in meeting her, he had helped something in her own heart bloom. 

“That’s not daft at all,” she finally whispers.

“Is it no’?” he says, with a lopsided smile.

“No,” Claire says. 

They stay there a moment longer, limbs entangled, watching the sun crawl higher into the sky and the longer shadows of late afternoon emerge. She can feel the damp underneath of her skirts where her vegetable patch has tried to become one with her legs. She plucks a blooming tomato flower and sticks it into the buttonhole of his vest. She still doesn’t have her answer, but she pushes the thought aside, and focuses on her husband.

“You made a very handsome printer,” Claire says.

“Oh, aye?”

“Mmm. You know, you would come home with your collar all ink-stained --”

“Christ, but yer a strange woman, Sassenach.”

“I’m serious! You get so -- so focused when you’re reading things, so I’d just imagine --”

“We’ve ink aplenty in the study, ye ken. Shall I stain my collars with it, then?”

“Do _not_ do that, it’s a misery to get out --”

“Is that so?”

“ _Aye_ , that is _so_ \--”

He’s made her start laughing again, and her heart, confused as it is, swells with the knowledge. She gets up before he can pin her to the garden bed, and smooths her hair, and offers him a weak sort of smile. Jamie’s grin is steadying in a way perhaps nothing else in the world is. He squeezes her hand, a reassurance, and Claire makes her way back to the house.

She meets Roger by the porch, looking sunkissed and happy.

“Hello,” she says, hoping she does not look too much as though she has been rolling around in the dirt.

“Oh! Er -- hullo, Mrs. Fraser. Are ye well, then?”

“Quite,” Claire says, smiling. It’s easy to make it genuine; Roger is a decent sort, down-to-earth and trying hard to be sincere. He’s taken this whole week so well in stride, and even allowed Willie to sermon him for fifty minutes on all the intricacies of the local fauna. “Are you getting ready for your trip then? I hope -- I wish I could do more to help.”

It comes out a bit blurted; Claire grimaces.

But Roger waves her off with one flat-fingered hand.

“Och, ‘tis no bother, Mrs. F. We’ll be jest fine -- ye ken, er, Mr. Meyers, I think? He came passin’ through yesterday? He agreed tae take us back to the beach, bypass the road entirely. Yer husband took care of the whole thing, said we’d be right safe wi’ Mr. Meyers.”

“Oh,” says Claire, holding her gardening gloves and not knowing quite how to feel. “Well -- I’m very glad for it.”

Beyond the door, she can hear chattering voices: Murtagh and Joe laughing about some thing or other, Willie begging Bree to share a piece of her fruitcake, Mrs. Flannigan scolding Fergus for sticking his fingers into dinner.

Roger shrugs, a sheepish grin upon his face.

“To be honest, I still sort of feel like this whole thing’s been a strange dream. One minute we were at the tourist office speakin’ wi’ that funny Frenchman, an’ the next -- weel, ye ken better than most what happened, I suppose, if what Frank said ‘tis true. But anyhow, I only hope we dinna land upon anymore trouble, or -- d’ye think it may no’ work at all? I was thinkin’ --”

But,

“Roger,” Claire has said suddenly, effectively cutting him off. A self-conscious flush rises up his neck and into his beard, but Claire ignores this, putting a gentle hand on his arm and asking, “A Frenchman, at the tourist office?”

“Weel … aye,” Roger says, slowly. “Short wee man, gave us directions. Rather funny lookin’, actually. Told Uncle Frank if we took the next left tae the cove, he’d find everythin’ he needed.”

Claire takes her hand away, and stares at him. Inside the house, there is a small crash, and someone -- Bree, she thinks vaguely -- loudly decries Adso’s ancestral lineage.

“You should get inside for dinner,” Claire says, smiling fully for the first time all day. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve just realized I have someplace to be.”

-IV.-

Claire arrives at the glade more or less breathless. For some reason, she had felt deep in her limbs that it was imperative to run the whole way there, and she takes a moment now to breathe deeply, and dip her head back to seek out the ends of the canopy trees. 

It’s so easy to grow roots in a place full of growing things.

Leaning down, she unlaces her boots, then picks them up in hand and walks the rest of the way to the Ridge itself, ignoring the uncomfortable press of bracken beneath her toes. Somewhere in the bushes a meadowlark sings. She can hear the rushing _shhh_ of the river below, carving its way through vast slabs of mountain and stretches of forested life.

Even had she not had an inkling, the simple silhouette of him -- the manner in which the ankles are held, the peculiar, short-statured set of his shoulders -- would be signal enough. She wonders briefly if she is dreaming again -- and then dismisses the thought.

If she was -- would it matter?

He is sitting atop the log, right where she thought he’d be, staring out at the distant mountains, and does not start when she comes and sits down next to him. 

“They are a sight to behold, are they not? Quite a home you have found for yourself here, Madonna.”

Claire feels her mouth curl into a smile, unbidden. She hitches up her skirts and apron and arranges them in her lap.

“I should have known it was you.”

“Ah, should have known _what_ was me? The grand master behind some elaborate design? Bah. I do not think so.”

“No?” 

“I am simply here at an opportune time,” says Master Raymond, turning to face her, “because I believe an old friend needed to speak with me.”

A warm, familiar smile graces his lopsided features. Whereas Claire knows time has left its fingerprints on her -- in the lines around her eyes, and her slowly greying hair, her changing figure and the tension in her neck at odd moments -- Raymond looks more or less the same. Just as odd, like an artifact sprung from an archeological dig somewhere come to life, or a renaissance artist of old. Without his wig and frilly clothing, he looks -- not out of place, but distilled. 

Even more unique a character than before.

“So you are a traveller, then,” Claire says, feeling the mellow summer breeze move over their little spot with a gentle sort of power.

“Of a sort,” Raymond says, waving one hand. “Not quite the same as you, _ma chere_.”

Claire falls silent, staring out at the mountain range before them. She counts for aspens and a fluttering birch, some wild carrot under a growing spot of moss and the fresh faced caps of some non-poisonous mushrooms. There, in the corner, right before the ridge dips into the sky, is a patch of heather.

“I didn’t realize heather grew here,” she murmurs.

“I do not believe it does,” Raymond says, with a glimmer in his eye.

“Why did you send Frank here?”

“Send? I did not send anyone. I merely nudged a man in the correct direction. Two very different things, you see.”

“But --” Claire starts, then stops, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

“ _There are more things on heaven and Earth, Horatio_ ,” he quotes, waggling his head a little bit as though to jest the reference. “I did not ever like your English Shakespeare so much,” he admits, making a face. “He does not have the elegance of French mathematicians. But no matter -- in that one line, it is said.” 

“So they are magic, then?” asks Claire, gripping her hands in her lap.

Raymond _hmphs_ loudly and shakes his head, flapping one hand. With the other, he reaches into his coat and retrieves an odd-looking sort of pipe, which he then proceeds to light.

“I did not think you so simple-minded, my good woman. _Magic_ \-- pft. Parlour tricks and the imaginations of the worldly. There is a passage in your husband’s Bible. If I am to remember correctly, Madonna, it reads, _the Kingdom of God is not here or there; the Kingdom of God is within you_. The Muslims, too, they have this saying -- translated from the original Arabic, of course -- that you _think thyselves a puny form, when the universe is folded within thee?_ And I believe it was your own English William Blake who once said one can hold infinity in the palm of one’s hand. 

So you see, Madonna,” he says, “we are all bound, each and every one, to something much larger and greater than ourselves.”

Raymond regards her with canny eyes, like he is trying to puzzle out some sort of secret Claire is holding deep within her breast. She frowns, picking at a blade of grass she has plucked from the earth.

Jutting her chin out stubbornly, she says,

“That still does not answer my question.”

“Does it not? You were not nearly this stubborn in Paris.”

“Perhaps I’ve changed.”

“Perhaps you have,” says Raymond cheerfully. “Well then. Let us put it like this. There are many things in this reality of ours that are not wholly physical. Love, perhaps. Have you heard of it?”

In spite of herself, Claire feels her lips twitch. “Here or there, perhaps.”

“Excellent! Now, think on that a moment. This love, it is not just a feeling in our fingers. Each act of love has power. It echoes beyond just what you or I see, or feel. Into eternity, Madonna. And I do not believe _eternity_ is bound by the physical time.”

On the far right of the glade, a heron abruptly takes flight. Claire starts; her fingers come down to clamp over the rough bark of the log they are sat upon, and she feels her wedding ring dig into her finger.

Words spoken to her years ago, exhausted and trapped in a history they could not alter, come to her mind now.

_Ye ken yer soul an’ mine -- they arena physical things, Claire. I dinna think. And time seems much like a physical thing. So I cannae help but feel that -- now, before, forever -- even when we die, God’ll ken I love ye, and you me, and -- and us, each other. Do ye not think it so?_

She had always thought this place had a sort of thrum running through it.

“Oh,” she breathes, lungs filling with the heady forest air surrounding them. “But I -- it wasn’t just me.”

Raymond is chuckling, lifting his pipe and tapping some of the excess out. “Oh, not at all. I am no expert on the matter, but I believe these things magnify -- tessellate, and _there_ is a mathematical idea -- when they encounter one another. They reach into the future and into the past. But, well, sometimes … I suppose we must see this elusive purity of heart with our own eyes, to be affected by its power.” His eyes glimmer again, and he looks at her expectantly. “That, _mon ami_ , is where the stones come in.”

“A marriage of the physical and the metaphysical,” Claire says, eyes slowly widening.

“Precisely!” says Raymond. “They are as much a part of this natural world as you or I, those blasted stones. Merely a vessel. The metaphysical and the scientific go hand in hand in almost all ways, you see.” He looks at her knowingly, then says, “Your husband, I believe, understands this, though he does not fully know what it is he understands. Quite ahead of his time, that young man.” 

_Scientific and metaphysical_. She thinks of how it had been, to find her home in another person, both infinitely simple and infinitely complex at once. Claire smiles, rueful.

“Quite,” she agrees.

“You must not be too concerned,” says Raymond. “People many years into the future still have not understood this, and I must say, it will cause them no end of trouble, Madonna. But there we have it. A universe of infinite and purposeful complexities.” Unexpectedly, he grins at her, Cheshire-like, as though all of this was simply a display of some particularly exotic wares. “Quite beyond the scope of living in that mysterious little shop and selling sleeping draughts to the unfortunate young husbands of extraordinary women, _non_?”

Claire laughs, suddenly feeling as though the entire mountain scape before her has changed into something more precious.

“I had _missed_ you, Raymond. I never realized …” She trails off, then shakes her head. It is as though a spell has broken; now she hears the animals again, the twitter of birds and rustling of underbrush, and remembers the sound of their errant cat indoors and what will surely be the beginnings of dinner starting.

Jamie will manage it -- she’s sure of it -- but she finds she doesn’t _need_ to be here, any longer.

“Thank you,” Claire says finally, into the vastness of the space before them.

“Think nothing of it, Madonna,” says Raymond quietly. “You always were one of my favourite people to converse with. Certainly more than any of those fools in court. I believe if they were to hear any of our exchange here, they might behead us on the spot.”

Claire laughs aloud, the reality of that threat long past, light hearted and grounded at once. 

When she turns back to look at him, he’s gone, as though he simply vanished into the golden green shadows of the trees around them.

Frank and Roger leave the next morning, on the back of the wagon John Quincey Meyers passed through the Ridge in routine visit. It’s early still, such that the grass outside the veranda is wet, and clings to Claire’s skirts. The purple-blue light of North Carolina’s pre-dawn, so achingly similar to Scotland’s, pales everyone’s cheeks and enriches the greenery. The treeline to their left blurs grey-green into the early morning horizon. There’s the call of morning doves somewhere in the space around them, and Claire rolls her shoulders back and approaches the man who was once her husband, folded paper in hand.

By the wagon, Roger is chatting with Meyers, having already said his goodbyes. Jamie is helping to pat the horses down before they leave, one eye kept covertly on the front of the house from behind a solid roan flank.

“I’m sorry I can’t come with you, to see you off,” she says quietly, feeling the damp morning air on her tongue.

“I -- it’s alright, Claire. I do understand why.”

“Yes,” she says, voice soft.

“I suppose I should say thank you,” Frank says, as though unsure how to put the simple sentence into words. He raises his splinted arm a bit, in aborted salute, and offers her a lopsided smile.

“Please,” says Claire. “You don’t.”

“I -- Claire --” He frowns, then looks away, to the house behind him. He looks back. “I meant it, you know. You seem terribly happy here.”

 _Two roads converged within the wood_ , Claire remembers. She takes his hands in hers, and presses the letter within them, then very briefly kisses his cheek.

“Take care of yourself, Frank,” she says. Then she watches as he nods, and steps away from her, and makes it back to the wagon. As the reigns snap and the wagon starts moving away, towards the perimeter of the Ridge, she sees Frank look down and open the letter in his hands.

 _Frank,_ it reads.

_I hope that, in glimpsing a little bit of real-life history, you might move forward in your life secure in the knowledge that past, present and future are not time, nor place, nor even entirely people, but a vision that seeks to love others, and move toward something greater than ourselves, together._

_All my eternal love,_

_Claire_

She meets Jamie at the front door of the house he built for her, feeling fancifully as though she might actually be a fae of old, held fast to the world around her by something far grander than simply herself. She wants to run inside and hold her children to her breast, to run her fingers through Willie’s curls and poke Bree until she giggles and smooth her hands over Fergus’s sweet brow.

His eyes are soft as he looks her over, one hand slipping itself neatly in between her fingers.

“Ye alright?” he says, just for her to hear.

Claire only nods, and raises her free hand to cup his cheek, warm and grounding in the early morning light.

“I do love you,” she says, like the growing of trees.

Jamie looks at her curiously, but doesn’t dispute this.

“And I you, Sassenach. Is that no’ why we’re all here?”

Behind them, sounds of the Ridge coming to life start swelling, and rise into the morning sky.

“Something like that,” Claire says, and together, they go inside.

**Author's Note:**

> i ask myself every day whether i think about the passage of time and the power of the things i do in this world correctly. "the future" as a nebulous linear point of eventual progress feels ... false, and paltry, given the tremendous amount of current, past, and (likely) future suffering that human beings encounter. to think consciously about the unifying power of acts of love, of kindness, of pure-heartedness, that can extend beyond your little community and into the complex web of the world, is something in large part gives me purpose and direction. while a lot of this story is not meant to be accurate to the historical time period in its sociopolitical backdrop, the way in which the Ridge exists as an isolated and protected community is more or less impossible in today's world. but remembrance of what unifies us is both grounding, bringing small groups of people together, and ever expanding, connecting everyone across time, space, and eras in humanity's history. we have to strive together to learn from people who came before, and cast our eyes to the future, not, as claire said, like a destination, but rather seeking an ever-expanding idea, bigger than simply ourselves, that unifies, instead of divides
> 
> outlander is, for me, at its core a love story. to call it a romance, or a historical drama, is a bit of a discredit, because it doesn't capture the power of that connection between people. there _is_ power to what claire and jamie have, even if canon sometimes loses sight of its potential. but i think, in its existence as a love story, theirs is the perfect vehicle for thinking about ideas like this. all love stories are.
> 
> perhaps a good exercise would be to ask ourselves: what am I doing each day, to bring love to the people i encounter, regardless of who they may be?
> 
>  **translations (gaelic and french)**  
>  Air sgàth an tighearna -- for God's sake  
> Thighearna ar dìon -- Lord protect us  
> Va chercher ton père et reste avec lui jusqu'à ce que je te récupère. -- go find your father and stay with him until I get back  
> Chan e còmhradh a tha seo -- this is not a discussion  
> ne plaisante pas -- don't kid around  
> Na bruidhinn mu chùisean teaghlaich air beulaibh choigrich. -- don't talk about family matters in front of strangers  
> Chan eil mi gu mòr air do shon -- i'm not really on top of you
> 
>  **historical notes**  
>  \- abolitionist efforts were happening as early as the late 1700s, and the Ridge is meant to be a bubble-like glade in the corner of the world far ahead of its time. that being said, the historical context of colonial slavery in the southern states and the horrors carried within should not be glossed over. nor should the sovereignty of indigenous lands, and the complicated and painful history between early settlers and indigenous peoples. i think that stories such as this one that take all of those elements into account, and are instead focused on characters like joe, gail, and isaiah, are of paramount importance to tell. but this is not meant to be that story, and i am not an author equipped to write that story. i sincerely hope that, maybe, some of you will be inspired to take up the proverbial pen in that regard  
> \- the female astronomer who discovers the comet bree is so excited about is caroline herschel, who did not actually discover anything until the 1780s and is in fact 4 years younger than bree, technically speaking. but we fudged the dates there, so bree could gush over a lady astronomer.  
> \- a fun historical note, but _one thousand and one nights_ , the anthology of scheherzade's stories claire begins to tell bree in their bedtime scene, was not translated from its original languages (including arabic, persian, and turkish, among others) to english until about the mid 1720s or so, and to find copies of it was probably rare, so claire's knowledge of it is definitely a result of her time travelling
> 
> i wish i could cite all of my literary references, but ao3 unfortunately does not give me the space. hmu if you're interested!
> 
> a final note: all the secondary characters (like young ian, marsali, roger, and the rest of the kids) are not meant to be true to their canon counterparts, and are mostly just borrowed concepts. roger, especially, is a character i really dont know much about, and so was shaped to fit in here specifically for the purpose of this fic. 
> 
> that's all for now, folks. there's one last epilogue left before this series is properly over. i hope you enjoyed! <3


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